Report and Recommendations on Course Transfer Policies

Date

Preamble

The number of transfer students, the number of transfer credits requested, and the range in types of credits have increased dramatically over the last decade:

  • Rutgers University has adopted formal articulation agreements with the two-year county and community colleges in New Jersey, and more recently, Admissions has instituted the so-called “Dual Degree Program” that “accepts” applicants to Rutgers University, but only after they have completed a prescribed program of study at one of the two-year schools with a specified gpa. We should expect a continuing increase in the number of students coming in with one or two years of transfer credits.
  • The steadily increasing enrollments (and enrollment pressures) at Rutgers New Brunswick have worked in synchrony with the articulation agreements noted above to not only increase the number of transfer students, but to greatly increase the number of students coming in with approximately two years worth of transfer credits.
  • The range of types of credits transferred has increased as a result of an influx of students from outside the United States, by a greater number of high school advanced placement opportunities, by colleges developing high school and other off-campus courses, and by a proliferation of distance education and short-session courses.

These changes and other developments within our university system have not necessarily been guided by a unified philosophy. On the one hand, the University is responding to overcrowding and the unprecedented demands for enrollment by developing articulation agreements and dual degree programs to decrease the time spent on the Rutgers campus during the four-year path to the degree. On the other hand, budgetary pressures have stimulated the University to enter the competitive customer-service-oriented marketplace by promoting more favorable transfer policies, offering short-courses during winter session, expanding distance education and off-campus offerings and so forth. It is not always clear that the one hand knows what the other hand is doing. It is clear that there is a growing consensus among faculty and academic deans that our transfer policies should be reexamined in light of these changes.

The following materials describe recommended policies for transfer of course credit and equivalency into Rutgers University programs. Many of these policies are already in existence, but with variation among the colleges. The initial goals of the NBFC Teaching Committee were to clarify, codify, and coordinate these policies, but the strength and diversity in the college system at Rutgers suggest that a single set of rigid policies might be unwise. Accordingly, we are providing this document as a resource and set of guidelines within which the individual units can develop policies:

Specific Recommendations on Course Transfer Policies 

College Level Entrance Program (CLEP) Exams

This program offers High School students (primarily) the opportunity to take subject area proficiency exams. The current practice fairly uniformly grants credit for performance in Level II foreign language exams above the 75th percentile.Many tests require department review because of essay sections. Mathematics, English and Psychology do not offer CLEP credit at Rutgers. 

Recommended Practice: Continue policy for college decisions with departments determining equivalencies.

High School Advanced Placement (AP) Exams

These exams are administered by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) to high school students who have completed a special section of an AP subject and pay to take the exam. Top scores of 4 or 5 are typically transferred for both credit and course equivalency by the colleges, with some departments accepting scores of 3.

Recommended Practice: Continue accepting AP scores of 4 or 5 with departmental discretion for specific equivalencies.(It should be noted that there are occasional students who have transferred as many as 30 credits toward graduation through AP exams, getting both high school units and college credits for the same course. In practice, these tend to be among the most talented students at Rutgers, and although some graduate early, most tend to remain for the full four years to engage in research and take advanced courses.)International Baccalaureate (IB) is currently making inroads into the AP market, vying for high school contracts in Cherry Hill and a couple of other systems. Currently, the admissions office recommends AP credit for “higher level” IB Diploma scores of 5, 6 or 7 (vs. “subsidiary level”) with departments or deans making specific equivalency decisions or, in some cases, exceptions to grant credit for a score of 4 .As other organizations enter this market, it is not clear that they will hold the same standards as the ETS (and IB).Only recognized AP and IB scores should be accepted until other testing methods have been approved on a case-by-case basis by the faculty of the appropriate discipline.

Placement Exams at Rutgers University

These exams are commonly used in departments such as mathematics or writing to determine placement into different levels of a subject (e.g., precalculus vs. calculus). Equivalency is granted for the purposes of prerequisites, but credit is not given.

Recommended Practice: Continue unchanged.

Proficiency Exams at Rutgers University

Proficiency exams (also known as Credit-by-Exam) are provided in-house in some disciplines for a fee of $40.The department may grant both equivalency and credit.

Recommended Practice: Continue, but with a watchful eye. These exams are not very common, but the committee noted some gray areas between Placement Exams and Proficiency Exams, where the results of one leads only to equivalency and the other to both equivalency and credit.

Placement Exams from Other Accredited Institutions

In general, these exams are disregarded for both equivalency and placement.

Recommended Practice: Continue policy of no credit or equivalency. There may be some cases where other schools might grant credit for these exams, making it difficult to discriminate on the transcript.

High School Courses for College Credit

State law requires the acceptance of these courses for college credit (students also receive the high school credit.)Students may not take more than two such courses per semester in high school.

Departments determine equivalencies.

Recommended Practice: Continue to follow the law.

Short-Session Courses

There has been a proliferation of short-session courses, sometimes less than three weeks in duration during winter break. The NBFC has strongly recommended that Rutgers discontinue offering full 3- or 4- credit courses during its 3½ week winter term, and many departments do not accept courses that meet on these condensed schedules. Colleges may have little choice but to accept because of articulation agreements and inability to discriminate these courses on a transcript.

Recommended Practice: Continue current policies with caution. Recommend that Rutgers set a high standard for its own offerings. Recognize that there may be a few colleges that have their entire curriculum set up for short-session courses with carefully planned support, facilities, and programmatic development that reduce the typical concerns about such offerings.

Portfolio Assessment

Some institutions (most notably Thomas Edison CC in this region) provide credit opportunities for a portfolio description of expertise gained through employment (e.g., as an accountant), independent study, and other out-of-classroom experiences.

Recommended Practice: Continue to offer credit, but restrict maximum to 12 credits. Right now, portfolio assessment is rather uncommon and typically results in only a course or two of transfer. The committee noted some gray areas between this process and the case of ESL students who typically do not have an opportunity to earn credit for their language experience.

Extension, Professional, and Continuing Education Courses

Courses offered in these programs typically have informal or no prerequisites and are designed to provide discrete, targeted information rather than being a part of a broader curriculum (typical examples might include computer programming courses, biology courses within a nursing program, etc.)Colleges typically transfer credit for some of these courses when they have obvious cognates at Rutgers. Departments determine specific equivalencies.

Recommended Practice :Continue granting credit, but with caution. It should also be noted that it is becoming increasingly difficult to discriminate these courses because some schools will enter them on the transcript without identifiers.

Non-accredited Institutions

Some small, private institutions offer courses and transcripts, but have not received regional accreditation (e.g., Middle States Association) or professional accreditation.

Recommended Practice: No credit or equivalencies.

Duplicate Course Titles

Many courses at NJ’s two-year colleges have course titles and general content similar to those of upper-level courses taught at Rutgers. A number of Rutgers programs require the upper-level course as a prerequisite or for completion of a major.

Recommended Practice: Departments should have the right to refuse credit for these lower-level courses when the comparable upper-level course at Rutgers is completed. Clear announcements should be present on our web pages and articulation agreements to inform students that transfer credit may be rescinded if a cognate upper-level course is completed. The committee noted some inconsistency between a policy where a student completes two college-level courses and receives credit only for the upper level course, and the situation of a student earning units toward high school graduation in an AP course and, on the basis of an exam, also receiving college credits for the course. Accordingly, departments are advised to consider these situations carefully before denying or rescinding credit.

Programs Not Offered at Rutgers

Some colleges offer courses for which there is no comparable program at Rutgers.

Recommended Practice: Credit may be granted as free electives as long as the program is determined to be a legitimate academic discipline.

Non-Classroom Courses

Most institutions offer independent study, fieldwork, internships and other non-classroom courses. Some programs (especially during summer) are quasi-academic jobs for pay. Academic units differ at Rutgers, with some granting free-elective transfer credit for independent study courses, but not for fieldwork and internships. Credit is not granted for paid internships. Departments may permit equivalency and credit on a case-by-case basis for fieldwork and internships.

Recommended Practice: Continue current policies.

Courses Taken Outside the US

Courses completed at international institutions pose special challenges for determining transfer because of language barriers, credit structure, accreditation standards, and disciplinary boundaries.

Recommendations: The World Education Service (WES) has a long and reputable history of providing recommendations for credit and equivalencies for courses taken outside the US. The International Baccalaureate (IB) program provides a standardized, structured course of instruction and exams that can be adapted by US high schools for credit. Some more recent entrants into this area include International Institute of Education (IIE), Joseph Silney & Associates’ International Education Consultants (IEC), Globe Language Services (GLS), Education Credential Evaluation (ECE), and International Consultants of Delaware (ICD). Although each of these is performing a valuable service for the students and the receiving institutions, this is clearly a competitive marketplace where students will migrate toward the maximum credits granted. Rutgers should work with our Study Abroad Program, knowledgeable faculty, and other institutions to develop a more comprehensive list of requirements for transfer. Departments will continue to determine specific equivalencies, but may need assistance and guidance concerning some of the above-mentioned difficulties.

Distance Education and Other Nontraditional Modes

There has been a proliferation of distance education courses offered by both accredited and non-accredited institutions. Many of these courses fall into the category of continuing education or extension courses and may not have formal prerequisite structure, while others are offered within the context of a standard curriculum. In a survey conducted last year by the NBFC Teaching Committee, it was learned that most individual departments at Rutgers do not knowingly accept these courses for credit toward the major.

Recommended Practice: Colleges will have little choice but to accept these courses for transfer because of articulation agreements and difficulty in identification on transcripts. Individual departments should continue to determine specific equivalencies. 

Global Considerations and Recommendations

The issues of transfer are amazingly complex and offer platforms for almost everybody to adopt and defend a position or two:

Students. Students want to receive credit where credit is due. If they paid their tuition, took their exams and received credit at one institution, they expect that credit to be a common currency that is accepted at all other institutions. Often, it is not. When students transfer to Rutgers, they are often frustrated and confused by some credits that do not transfer at all, some that transfer credit but do not confer equivalency, and some that place them in a Catch 22 of being able to transfer credits now, but which they will lose later when they take a required upper-level course. Even more frustrating, students may see some credits taken away (or added) later through transcript re-evaluation if they do a college-to-college transfer within Rutgers. Even in situations where there might be a “full-faith-in-credit” policy and every single course that a student has taken is given transfer credit, the student is not out of the woods. Typically, these transferred courses do not meet specific distribution or major requirements, and a transfer student may require 130 to 150 credits before meeting all of the specific requirements for graduation.

Faculty. Faculty members typically want to maintain academic integrity and make certain that students leave Rutgers with an education that befits the flagship institution of New Jersey. They tend to set high standards of acceptance and limit the number of total credits for courses transferred into the minor and major of the discipline. Even when credits have been transferred for courses outside their discipline, faculty remain concerned about the general readiness of students to succeed in upper-level courses at Rutgers and the impact that less prepared students might have on the classroom environment.

Administration. Administrators may have diverse perspectives on transfer. Academic officers may hold views and goals very similar to those of the faculty, and see restrictive transfer policies as ways of helping to maintain the standards and reputation of the academy and as ways of ensuring that students do not suffer from enrolment in courses or programs for which they are not prepared. Enrollment managers may see transfer from the customer service perspective, viewing lenient transfer policies as a means of being more competitive in attracting students .Budgetary officers may have mixed views on this, weighing the competitive benefits of lenient transfer policies against the tuition loss of requiring fewer paid courses at Rutgers. Program officers are also interested in budgetary aspects, seeking additional courses that can be favorably ‘exported’ to receiving institutions.

Government. State officials want to see smooth transitions of high school students into appropriate college or university settings, and equally smooth transitions from the two-year county and community college systems into the four-year state colleges and Rutgers University. In all of these situations, ease of transfer would seem to be the goal.

Employers. Employers need a predictably well-educated workforce .In some cases, they rely heavily on the reputation of the institution.In other cases, they may look more closely at the transcript of the prospective employee in an attempt to create a picture of the individual’s capabilities. The employers need truth-in-advertising for this process to work.

Resolution

Be it resolved that Rutgers should adopt and encourage the policy of truth-in-advertising on transcripts. Credits that are earned by special modes of instruction (e.g., distance education, high-school AP, CLEP, Proficiency Exam, etc.) should be clearly identified on transcripts in the same way that we have traditionally identified special modes of instruction for other courses such as fieldwork, internships, research, independent study, honors courses, and seminars.

In addition to the separate college sections, a clear statement of general transfer policies should be presented in special sections of the:

·Undergraduate Catalogue – Admissions section

·University web page– Admissions section

·ARTSYS site– home page

·ARTSYS should be kept up-to-date with funding and staffing

Recommendations for Transfer Student Policies

Need for Data

The faculty and college deans can provide thoughtful and reasoned input into policies concerning transfer students only if they have routine access to the relevant institutional data. To this end, it is recommended that the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment develop a detailed data protocol and provide updated summaries on 01 OCT and 01 APR of each academic year to the Vice President for Undergraduate Education, the Chair of the New Brunswick Faculty Council, the President of the University Senate, and to each college deans office for distribution to the appropriate committees and administrators. It is expected that this data summary will evolve and expand, but should include all of the data presented in the accompanying appendix plus the following specific additions:

  1. Include Cook College and University College in the data summaries.
  2. For all of the measures, provide the appropriate comparison data for “standard” 4-year Rutgers students.
  3. Include all data up to the previous term (e.g., the October report should include all relevant data from the previous spring term.)
  4. Profiles of most recent admissions criteria.
  5. Profiles of most recently admitted students.
  6. Data showing trends of all data over preceding decade.
  7. Inferential statistics to develop profiles of transfer students and their likelihood of success at Rutgers.
  8. Transfer courses that serve as special prerequisites for Rutgers courses should be monitored to ensure that students who use these courses pass the Rutgers courses at an appropriate rate.

Resolution: Be it resolved that the Vice President for Undergraduate Education be asked to set up a committee to work out a formal agreement with the Office of Instructional Research to provide the requested data.

Student Concerns

There are a number of problems involving the actual enrollment process for transfer students that have the earmarks of a bait-and-switch practice. These need to be addressed immediately, preferably by a committee made up of representatives of the NBFC, the University Senate, college deans offices, and admissions staff. The problems that need to be resolved include:

  1. Transfer orientation is almost universally viewed as a dreadful experience. Students arrive with little prior information about what needs to be done and, most importantly, they have almost no courses available (!) for enrollment. (Douglass College has adopted the option of granting immediate leaves of absence to transfer students when they cannot find appropriate courses for the first semester!)
  2. There should be strict cut-off dates for transfer admissions of 01 JUN for Fall term and 01 OCT for Spring term to allow departments time to properly plan for class size and staffing of sections.
  3. Voluntary placement tests should be made available to avoid the many disasters that occur because transfer students are not actually ready for the courses in which they enroll. Departments should also be prepared to recommend different placement of students if it becomes apparent that success is unlikely.
  4. Detailed information should be made available to transfer students regarding major requirements; many are not prepared in the discipline of their putative major and may have a year or more of remedial work to become prepared.
  5. Students should receive realistic information about possible majors. Currently, the School of Business is virtually inaccessible to transfer students, yet it is one of the most popular planned majors.
  6. Formal dialogue should be established between Rutgers University and the county/community colleges to provide current and detailed information about transfer possibilities.
  7. A clear pedagogical framework needs to be established for transfer students so their academic pursuits are logical and sequential from the first term through the baccalaureate degree, even with transfer.
  8. A writing course should either be required or highly recommended for all transfer students. Livingston College already requires such a course. 
  9. Special advising opportunities should be put into place, recognizing that in many respects, transfer students share the problems confronted by first-year students.

Resolution: Be it resolved that the Vice President for Undergraduate Education should set up a formal standing advisory council with representatives from NBFC, University Senate, college deans offices, admissions staff, and financial aid to meet on a regular basis (at minimum, once per term) to discuss policies of transfer admission, articulation agreements, and support services to ensure that the University’s primary mission as the flagship academic institution is reflected in its admissions and curricular decisions.