Destination USA

In some countries, after the senior year, the students pass an examination one or more subjects. Sometimes it’s optional, sometimes it’s not. For instance, in France, le BAC is a requirement in order to continue on your studies. In the UK, students have the possibility of taking A-levels if they want to.

The thing is, it’d be quite annoying to take all those exams, go to the USA for your undergrads, and don’t have them recognized for anything… Fortunately, many colleges will have a policy regarding those and other international standard tests and granting you credits.

Depending on how much you get on your exams, you may apply to get credits for the subjects you’ve aced. This is useful as it will prevent you from repeating again an introductory course which you know so well you could be teaching it, or in fulfilling electives (courses which don’t really have anything to do with your major, but you must choose a couple.)

Also, even if the examination you’ve passed is not the most popular one on the earth, some colleges, provided that you’ve given them enough information on the nature of the exam, will still give you credit.

You usually receive between 3 or 4 credit units (the equivalent of a course), for each exam you’ve successfully taken. Beware that the different universities will have different requirements on how high your grade must be in order to receive those units.

Another thing you could do in case your exams are not accredited is to arrange for testing at the university itself. There might be, at the beginning of the year, some tests offered for this purpose. Or, it might be that you have to fill out the paperwork and hand in a request, or follow some other procedure. All of this depends on where you study. Most of the time, all the information needed concerning the accreditation of international examination is on university website.

A (hopefully) last thing to be aware of, is that if you’d like to be accredited for a course which is required for your major, you might run into some trouble. Often, universities require that the core courses for your degree are taken there, and that you pass the examination there. The “good thing” is that you will rarely be able to present them a certification of having passed a subject on such an advanced level right after your high school studies. This will most rather happen by “transferring” credits, or accrediting other types of tests, which is an entirely different process.

Tags: A-level, BAC, credits, exams, international, tests

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 at 7:44 am and is filed under Etudes de "Undergrad"/ Undergraduate studies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.