Hi everybody,
I’m an international student in Virginia. I will have completed my Associate by December and am planning to transfer in Fall 2018. Whenever I go to a school admission website for transfer students, I usually see the requirement to submit transcripts from all colleges and institutions attended. Yet, my problems were that my previous colleges were not in US. One of them was in Vietnam, and the other one was in Finland. I dropped both of them before getting any degree. I just followed what my family told me to choose, so I studied Business Administration in these schools and since I was not really interested in this major, I did not focus on the courses and my GPA was a mess. After dropping the schools and go to the US, I found my interest in Computer Science and start all over again in a Virginia Community College and put many effort into my study here. However, I did not list any of my previous schools when I applied to this Community College.
I am quite confused now since I don’t know if I can drop my previous school outside the US or if I have to list them in my transfer application? By the way, I dropped the school without any paper works, so I don’t have any transcript of these school now.
You are obligated to provide official copies of those transcripts. In fact, you should have submitted them when you applied to your community college.
You need to contact each of those foreign colleges/universities, let them know that you are applying to colleges and universities in the US, and ask them to send copies of your transcripts. They will tell you what you need to do to get your transcripts.
You need to do this soon, and you need to give them to your CC as well. If they find out that you didn’t, they might take away your AA. So go talk with your advisor about this as soon as you can and get things fixed.
You definitely need to submit them. Cornell University expelled a student who failed to disclose her community college courses on her application and demanded a refund of their financial aid a year or two ago, I believe. Schools are getting serious about this stuff so you need to be 100% upfront.
As a transfer with an associates you might not need to submit the non-US transcripts, particularly if you are not planning to transfer any of those credits. You should, however, list your attendance on your application. The best place to ask about whether you need to submit those transcripts is the admissions office at the schools you are planning to transfer to.
Your admissions committee will be most interested in what you’ve done in the last three years or so. Bad grades from longer ago are much less likely to hurt your chances.
@CTScoutmom - I can see where in some cases a student who has fulfilled the requirements of an articulation agreement might not need to pony up the foreign transcripts along with the application, but when the student is formally enrolled in that new degree program, the transcripts will be required. This is all part of the colleges and universities playing nice with each other, and respecting each other’s degree programs. In addition, the receiving institution needs to know how to classify that new student. More credits might give the student senior status and result in higher priority for class scheduling. Clear second degree status would mean no aid other than unsubsidized loans. Someone applying for admission to a degree program at an accredited college or university in the US (or for a job that requires all academic records) is obligated to provide official transcripts from every institution attended. No matter how long ago. No matter where in the world. Whether any credits transfer is a completely different issue. Most institutions will also require that the foreign transcripts be formally evaluated by one of the organizations that specialize in that work. Many will accept the evaluations performed by WES.org.
@happymomof1 @thetransfercoach Thanks very much. I’ll contact my previous school to ask about this. Yet, in case they no longer hold my records, does this affect my application profile?
@AroundHere and @CTScoutmom Thanks, I’ll ask the schools I’m going to transfer to to ask about this
Then you would need to ask the universities that you are applying to what it is that you need to do. In fact, since you are in an AA program, you need to start by getting those foreign records to your CC. They can cancel your degree if you don’t do that. You were supposed to provide records of all of your previous education when you enrolled in a degree program at the CC.