Formal Articulation Versus Case-by-Case Assessment
In this Section
6. Formal Articulation vs Case-by-Case
6.1 Maintaining Internal Transfer Records
Best Practices
6. Formal Articulation Versus Case-by-Case Assessment
Although the processes are often similar and mostly the same players are involved, course-to-course articulation is not synonymous with the assessment of transfer credit in a specific instance.
Articulation usually occurs in the absence of any student, and often before a course has been offered. It forms an agreement that binds the parties should a student subsequently move from the sending to the receiving institution. It is a public, transparent agreement, involving responsibilities on both institutions
On the other hand, when an institution receives an application from a student who has taken a course that is not listed in the BC Transfer Guide (whether the institution is within BC, in another part of Canada, or is elsewhere in the world) the institution may employ agreed criteria to decide whether to assess the course and potentially award transfer credit to the student.
e.g. an institution might have a policy to award an equivalent quantity of transfer credit for any course successfully completed in an arts or science program leading to a bachelor's degree, taken at any recognized degree-granting institution in North America. An applicant has a year of Finnish language credit towards a B.A. at the University of Minnesota. This is accepted as 30 credits of unassigned transfer credit towards the BC institution's bachelor degree in Computer Science.
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Most institutions record the transfer credit assessment internally and use it as a precedent in the event that another student or applicant takes the same course, but such assessments are not normally published publicly and are not considered formal agreements. The receiving institution usually does not advise the source institution of the assessment, nor does either party bear any responsibility to keep the other advised of curriculum changes, course numbering changes, etc. This process is sometimes referred to as a "student-specific transfer credit assessment", "non-articulated transfer credit" or "case-by-case" transfer credit. |
Course-to-course articulation is not synonymous with the assessment of transfer credit in a specific instance. |
For expediency, UVIC initiates these assessments using calendar descriptions alone, if the source is a university or college in North America. Most other receiving institutions expect the student to provide an official course outline, which can be a burden for a student. It seems reasonable, and is the practice at UVIC, to request a course outline only if there is doubt about the nature of the course. In many cases, the calendar description will be sufficient to yield an assessment, especially if that assessment is without prejudice in other cases. That is, no guarantee is given or implied that the same evaluation would be used in every other case. However, for true articulation of a course, implying a contract between the sending and the receiving institution, the current standard practice of requiring a course outline is prudent.
An institution is free to use a case-by-case assessment as aprecedent but is not bound to do so. Often such courses are seen again only sporadically. Institutional policy or the judgment of staff will determine whether a preceding assessment is sufficiently current to be re-used. Generally, an assessment should have been made within the previous five years for it to be used as a precedent, but this will vary by discipline. A Latin course, for example, might have changed very little, but within a few years a Computer Systems Design course might be completely different.
Although institutions receive these two types of assessment requests from quite different sources and in completely different forms, internal processes frequently mingle these together, so that at the academic department level, the assessor might see little difference between them. Sometimes transfer credit assessment receives a higher task priority than a request for articulation, because actual rather than potential students are involved. The immediate needs of students havemore urgency, so when resources are stretched, delaysin articulation can occur.
Many BC institutions have expanded their recruitment efforts both nationally and internationally. The resulting greater diversity of the educational backgrounds of applicants and new students places increased demands on those involved in transfer credit and credential assessment. If an institution is under-resourced to cope with these demands, articulation and transfer requests cannot be responded to in a timely manner.
6.1 Maintaining Internal Transfer Records
Each evaluation must be recorded. Although it would be possible to rely solely on BCCAT's Transfer Credit Evaluation System (TCES) for maintaining a record of the institution's articulation agreements, no receiving institution does. They record a much broader range of transfer credit assessments such as courses offered by other receiving institutions, out-of-province institutions and unarticulated upper level courses within BC.
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This record must be consulted for every subsequent similar case to ensure consistency in evaluations. For courses articulated within BC, the institutional database should match the BC Transfer Guide database exactly, but if a discrepancy should arise, the published database should prevail or the benefit of the discrepancy should be in favour of the student. Any errors in either database should, of course, be corrected. |
Publishing international transfer lists in the form of a simple, searchable, public database is a benefit to staff, prospective students, and current students, and represents best practice. |
Most institutions, then, have a searchable internal database of previous assessments that is accessible to some staff who then use previous assessments as precedents, saving considerable effort in re-assessing the same course multiple times. If this is not available to staff, each unarticulated course taken by an incoming student will require assessment, increasing the load on those responsible for this task and potentially delaying requests from sending institutions for articulation.
Mostly, these searchable lists are not available to prospective or enrolled students but are limited to access by authorized staff. Notable exceptions exist: UVIC and TWU publish their internal transfer lists in the form of a simple, searchable, public database. This is a benefit to staff, prospective students and currently enrolled students, and represents best practice.
To some extent, limiting access to internal tables represents a failure to use readily-available technology, possibly a consequence of inadequate resources. To avoid duplication and possibly inconsistency of information, the public database should refer or link the user to the BC Transfer Guide, if the equivalency rule exists there. If the rule does not exist there, a valid date range would ensure that users are not misled by out-of-date entries.
A typical result from the UVIC query is for the following course from an Ontario university:
Institution: Brock University
TCCourses#: 89647Location Code: CANINST Year Course Evaluated: 2001
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Year
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Required
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Source Course
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Course Title
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UVic
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PC or LVL
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UVic Units
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| 1997 | PSYC 1F90 | Introduction To Psychology | PSYC 100A PSYC 100B |
1.5 1.5 |
Another example is the following assessment conducted for a UVIC student planning to broaden her/his choice of third year Anthropology courses, using the Letter of Permission procedure. Because this is an unarticulated assessment between two receiving institutions and is at the third year level, it cannot be found in the BC Transfer Guide.
Institution: University of British Columbia
TCCourses#: 246649 Location Code: BCUNI Year Course Evaluated: 2007
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Year
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Required
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Source Course
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Course Title
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UVic
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PC or LVL
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UVic Units
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| 2007 | ANTH 304 | Ethnography Of The North - West Coast | ANTH 391 | 1.5 |
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Nevertheless, institutions should be cautiousaboutpublishing transfer credit assessments that have not been formally articulated. These assessments might be idiosyncratic or out-of-date and could potentially mislead someone who might assume them to be current and accurate. The institution must clearly state their conditions of use, such as when the listed credit might not be applicable. Generally, once published in this manner, the institution must be prepared to stand by the stated equivalencies. |
The principle of a single data source or knowledge base is important. |
The principle of a single data source or knowledge base is important. There are many examples of receiving institutions that have fragmented records of transfer credit precedents maintained by different departments.
e.g. A large research university that has an international student exchange program determines transfer (exchange) credit for its students who take courses elsewhere, but the institution chooses to not record these in the transfer credit precedent database used by admission staff. The unfortunate consequence is that another student, admitted from that same overseas university, but not an exchange student, might receive different credit for the same course.
Several of the institutions take advantage of automated transfer credit modules in their SIS, so the transfer relationships are entered directly to those systems. A data feed is currently available to enable TCES data to be uploaded to the institutions' various SIS databases, but most institutions appear not to use this function. The reasons for this are not clear but likely relate to the relatively small volumes of routine changes that are available in TCES, compared with the greater volumes of unarticulated or case-by-case evaluations, the need to change tables immediately after a decision is made and possible lack of complete data in TCES, as required by the SIS vendor. In addition, some SIS transfer credit modules do not provide exactly the fields necessary to track the progress of requests and to whom they were sent, and to record when the evaluations were reviewed and by whom.
Consequently, some institutions maintain several separate databases, each requiring manual data input, to keep track of transfer rules, resulting in a multiplication of effort. Institutions should not need to maintain any more than their SIS and TCES, depending on how flexible their SIS is.
Both UVIC and SFU use a small-scale database to keep track of requests. In UVIC's case, the database is their complete transfer credit precedent database, because none of these records is kept in their legacy SIS, currently being replaced by SCT Banner. It appears to be an efficient and cost-effective tool for reference purposes.
Next Section: Functionality of the Transfer Credit Evaluation System (TCES)
