Functionality of the Transfer Credit Evaluation System (TCES)
In this Section
7. Functionality of the TCES
7.1 Is the TCES sufficient?
Best Practices
7. Functionality of the Transfer Credit Evaluation System (TCES)
There is unanimous agreement among the receiving institutions that BCCAT's TCES is effective and efficient. Staff members who recall using earlier processes, especially those that were paper-based, never wish to return to those days. Nevertheless, many institutions still use a paper-based process internally, when referring the request from the ICP to an academic department. The reasons given are that the Transfer Request Form is too long and confusing and that departments prefer to handle paper. This does not appear to be an issue at UVIC, where the academic departments receive requests by email, saving the Registrar's staff considerable time, materials and effort. BCCAT plans to streamline the Transfer Request Form in future.
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Sometimes an institution will not respond to an articulation request because there might be no curriculum match at the receiving institution. TCES gives only the following three options for each new request, which some receiving institutions find too restrictive:
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At UVic, the academic departments receive requests by email, saving the Registrar's staff considerable time, materials, and effort. |
Normally, a receiving institution would respond by either denying credit or by establishing credit as some type of unassigned credit. Another option that could be considered by BCCAT is to permit a receiving institution to respond with:
- Evaluation request declined - curriculum does not match
- To be evaluated at request of student or applicant
The advantages of this form of decision deferral might be
- fewer incomplete evaluations requests
- faster turnaround at the receiving institution
- reduction in the number of "no credit" evaluations
- less resources expended on evaluations that might never be utilized
Once a "no credit" evaluation has been made, and recorded in the BC Transfer Guide, a student will usually not receive transfer credit for that course. However, if the course had not previously been evaluated, a case-by-case evaluation might result in transfer credit for a student.
Another option currently being considered by BCCAT is the implementation of at time limit for pending articulation requests. It appears that many sending institutions submit articulation requests that may not have a suitable match at the receiving institutions. As such, many receiving institutions have not been responding to these requests, leading to backlog of articulation requests. BCCAT is considering a one year time limit on articulation requests by sending institutions. If a receiving institution has not responded to the request with a one year period, the request will be archived and a notification will be sent to the sending institution. It is the hope that this will help mitigate the current backlog of pending articulation requests.
7.1 Is The TCES Sufficient?
The BC Transfer Guide and the TCES infrastructure behind it are practical applications of current technology but do not integrate directly with any existing SIS. Each institution needs to either import the TCES data in XML or another format or key the data separately to their SIS. In at least some cases, it would not be a simple matter to integrate the mostly textual data output of TCES to provide a compatible data feed to all proprietary SISs. Further, even if this could be done, the TCES evaluations represent only a small minority of all transfer table entries to the SISs in the larger institutions, so the savings of effort would be limited and not necessarily cost-effective.
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