Two weeks ago Chris Buonocore, Alex Humphreys, Martin Kurzweil and Emily Tichenor (all of the nonprofit organization Ithaka, and part of the Articulation of Credit Transfer Project) posted in this blog the happy news that Transfer Explorer (a website, modeled after CUNY T-Rex, that shows everyone how prior learning experiences will count toward a college’s academic requirements) has been launched containing information from three South Carolina colleges. Information from dozens of additional colleges in Connecticut, New York, South Carolina and Washington will be added in the coming months.
Because this information is now public and usable, students and advisers will be able to make better plans for transfer, students will discover and choose transfer destinations that are a good fit for them, and institutions will be better able to align their programs and equivalencies to facilitate transfer. Transfer Explorer will also reduce the burden on students, advisers and admissions staff to locate and make sense of relevant information across disparate sources, allowing them to focus on higher-value tasks. The evidence from CUNY T-Rex suggests these benefits are already being realized in that context.
The advent of Transfer Explorer and other similar efforts to make transparent the rules on credit transfer and degree applicability raises an important question: Which policies and practices are desirable for institutions to have in place to make their credit mobility information public?
Let’s assume that a public website, such as Transfer Explorer, is available for displaying credit mobility information, and that an institution has the appropriate financial and staff resources to put its information on the website. Now what course credit and program requirement policies and practices must be in place, and which additional ones would be useful to have? This post describes some of these policies and practices.
Necessary Policies and Practices
Absolutely essential is that transfer credit rules stating how an institution will treat all types of prior learning experiences (e.g., course A at Institution X will count as equivalent to course B at Institution Y), as well as the program and degree requirements (for majors, concentrations, general education, etc.), must be systematically and consistently stored, recorded and updated in the institution’s software system(s), with the credit mobility website reflecting any changes in any of these rules and requirements in a timely manner. These practices are essential for the website to function as a trusted source of information.
There should be policies regarding who can change the transfer credit rules and degree requirements recorded in this software and under what conditions. This will reduce the likelihood of erratic, capricious or frequent changes, while ensuring that all students are subject to the same rules and requirements, without prejudice.
Any additional rules, requirements, restrictions or qualifications related to the conditions for granting credit for prior learning (such as a minimum grade in a prior course or a residency requirement at the destination college) should apply equally to all students and be explicitly and publicly stated. This ensures that all students have access to the same information, again promoting equitable treatment.
There should be administrative oversight of the above policies and practices, and that oversight should ideally be provided by people who would be unaffected by the rules’ consequences (i.e., conflicts of interest should be minimized). Oversight by people not acting in their own interest is necessary to ensure that policies and practices are appropriately instituted and maintained.
Additional Desirable Policies and Practices
It will be helpful to have policies regarding how course equivalencies for prior learning are decided in the first place—who decides and based on what information. This will promote efficient and effective decision-making regarding prior learning assessments.
There should also be specific, agreed-upon criteria for giving credit for prior learning. It has been effectively argued that transfer credit should be based entirely on learning outcomes, and not on, e.g., a course’s prerequisites, textbook or modality (in-person, online or hybrid); the degree the student may or may not have; the student’s major; etc. AACRAO’s recommended criterion for course equivalency is 70 percent “matching of content.” Such a policy ensures that credit for prior learning is based on only that—prior learning.
Any characteristics of prior learning, in addition to credits, that would satisfy an institution’s requirements, characteristics such as a course being writing intensive or including material on information literacy, should be recorded and considered for transfer. Students and those who support them need this information to be able to plan students’ complete academic trajectories.
An explicit appeals procedure that allows students to challenge transfer credit decisions can help in identifying errors and inadequacies in what is shown on the website, as well as promoting equitable treatment of all students (an example of the CUNY appeals procedure is here). Students can more effectively use such a procedure if the website keeps a record of when transfer credit rules and program and degree requirements have changed and how.
All courses from institutions accredited by what were formerly referred to as regional accreditors (along with, upon review, some other forms of prior learning) should be given at least elective credit. In addition to providing transfer students with predictable transfer credit, such a policy within the CUNY system greatly facilitated the establishment of CUNY T-Rex. For the courses of the 20 CUNY undergraduate colleges, developers had only to reflect on the website existing transfer credit rules (all 1.6 million of them); they did not have to determine what to do with courses that would receive no transfer credit.
Also highly desirable is that a student should be allowed to use any credit transfer rule in place at College B between when the student first matriculated in College A and subsequently transferred to College B (perhaps within a specified number of years since matriculation at College A). Such a policy is particularly useful for students who first matriculate at a community college and later transfer to a bachelor’s college within the same system. This policy would enable students and those who support them to plan a student’s entire academic trajectory.
Finally, in developing Transfer Explorer as well as CUNY T-Rex, the engineers had to first parse and deconstruct the colleges’ major and other requirements before programming them for the website. Many of the majors’ diagrams look like a tangled ball of yarn or a Super Bowl football play (diagrams that go way beyond just a sequence of major courses). Faculty and others may not realize how complex they are making requirements until they see them diagrammed. Such requirements can be very difficult to program and so should be simplified, if possible, as well as recorded in systematic, consistent ways.
Each of the preceding items is useful for constructing an excellent website that will show how an institution will treat a student’s prior learning. However, there are many additional benefits from these policies and practices. For example, concerning the last bullet, keeping the requirements of majors simple and straightforward will not only help the website’s programmers, but will make it easier for students and those who support them to understand and conform to a major’s requirements.
A basic principle of ACT, Transfer Explorer and CUNY T-Rex is that all of us in higher education benefit by obtaining good information and making it public. We hope that this blog post helps institutions do just that.
