Understanding the Transfer Credit Business Process

Before you set up transfer credit rules and process transfer credit, complete all other setup for Student Records. You must define academic careers, academic programs, academic plans, the course catalog, grading bases, terms, and sessions. It is helpful to write out the rules for accepting transfer credit before you enter the rules in the system.

While the setup for the Transfer Credit feature is complicated, after you set it up, you can save a lot of time in the future.

Setting up for processing transfer credit involves defining the external organizations from which you accept transfer credit and defining all of the subject areas and courses that the external organization can transfer. A key aid to completing the setup for the Transfer Credit feature is to point any external organization or internal institution to any other external organization's or internal institution's catalog of courses. It is thus possible to create one group of external courses that a number of external organizations share. Sharing course information saves time because you do not have to duplicate your data entry effort if one or more organizations have the same or similar courses. It is especially helpful when dealing with a large transfer population from schools where courses are virtually the same or catalogs are shared. For instance, if your academic institution receives many transfer students from a state college system, you can create one catalog of external courses for the state college system where all state colleges in that system can point to for these courses.

Transfer equivalency rules that you create are the foundation of the Transfer Credit process. After you define external organizations, you create equivalency rules for courses and tests, then attach these equivalency rules to specific academic programs and academic plans. You also attach an equivalency rule to an external organization or internal institution.

After you complete the setup, you are ready to process transfer credit. Transfer credit processing is based on a concept of modeling various scenarios of transfer credit articulation. You set up model scenarios for an individual, dependent on the individual's chosen academic program and plan to demonstrate different options of transferring credit. Based on your setup, you have the ability to model as many transfer credit scenarios as you want for prospects, applicants, and current students. You also have the flexibility to articulate models based on predefined rules or rules that you create manually.