Transfer Credit Rule Rebuilding Project

Project Overview

In Fall 2024, the Office of Admissions and the Degree Progress Unit evaluated over 28,000 external transfer courses from incoming and continuing students. These students rely on rapid and accurate evaluation of this credit in order to adequately assess their degree progress using the Degree Progress Report and fulfill the prerequisites of courses they need to enroll in the next term. Historically, our transfer credit evaluation has been slowed and made less accurate due to a lack of maintenance of our transfer credit rules. Without updated rules evaluators have to perform more manual checks and entry of credit. As rules became outdated, inaccurate awards were given, leading to additional work to correct the awards, as well as significant work for students, advisors, and other campus constituencies.

The Transfer Credit Rule Rebuilding Project aims to modernize our transfer credit evaluation processes by:

1. Simplifying the structure of our transfer credit rules and the credit awarded.
2. Updating automated transfer credit rules for all 115 California Community Colleges. This includes building rules for every UC transferable course with accurate equivalencies.
3. Develop processes to update course information (i.e. course titles, new courses, etc) for all community colleges on an annual basis.
4. Build transfer credit rules for 4-year and out of state institutions.
5. Develop a process to ensure timely maintenance of rules in conjunction with the articulation process, such that our rules are never out of date.

To accomplish these goals we have evaluated transfer credit processes from other institutions to better align our rule structure with industry standards. An overview of how we have simplified our rules is available via Google Slides. We have prioritized all 115 community colleges based on historic transfer credit trends, prioritizing the schools in which we receive the most transfer credit. In addition to prioritizing our top sending institutions, we are making an early effort to update our most out-of-date schools as well.

In all, we have a goal set to complete our top 30 sending institutions plus and additional 20 school which are the most out of date by July 2025. This accounts for 43% of all California Community Colleges and over 60% of the transfer credit we receive historically. We aim to have rules for all community colleges built by July 2026.

Progress