excelsior problems....

well guys I am nearing the end of the road with excelsior and I guess it would not be complete with out a few bumps, but these bumps are really getting to me. I actually have a few problems at this point. First of which and probably the biggest is they are saying now that I have 12 more credits to complete and last may they said I had only 15 credits and I have taken 12 since then. After calling them and trying to figure out why, after an hour on the phone is it still unclear what changed causing me to all of a sudden have to an additional 12 credits. The staff was very helpful and polite and I am not trying to put them down in any way, the particular person I spoke to said there is some discrepancies in my file and she is going to review them to ensure the correctness of their statements and this may take a few days to do. I hope it works out that I will only need 3 more credits instead of 12 . The second thing that bothered me is the new requirement for research writing , another 1 credit class i presume will be as useful as their information literacy course but while reading the catalog I read you can submit a paper and get that class waved but I had to bring that up to her, I don't see why they don't automatically tell you that. I have been enrolled as an associates student there for about a year and could not enroll for a bachelors program until my AAT was conferred, so now I am not locked in to the old degree plan, and they told me previously this would not be an issue but i guess things change. NOW on top of all this they call me at 730 at night to try and tell me that my GPA on my degree they already gave me may be incorrect and that I may not have graduated with high honors and only honors. I am not sure they can take back a the award they already gave me, either way I am not worried about it but a little irritated.

 

Hello...... sorry to hear about your issues with Excelsior.
To be honest, the same thing happened to me 3-4 years ago when I was finishing up my Bachelors. There are too many different individuals who "advise" their students...which will say one thing at one point, and then another, at a later point.
Which basically shows that the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing.

The ironic thing is, and they tried to pull this stunt with me, but it was a matter of of having quarter hours converting into semester hours, which orignially put me 0.25 hours shy of graduation(119.75 / 120.00). And when one advisor says that can be "waived", I took their word for it. Then as I was petitioning for graduation another person said no.....I was denied, and that I needed to take another class. What, a 0.25 sem hour class doesn't exist!!!! I wasn't about to drop 300-500 on another in-field class at 3 hours, and there wasn't any 1 credit class that would fit into my subject area...
so, I had all the documentation, names, dates, times, transcripts of conversations.
So I petitioned for an audit and review, for dispute ....... it lasted 1-2 months.... I got my way and graduated.

As nice as Excelsior College is to take classes, and transfer classes and hours into a program.........a student needs to keep a serious and well-documented journal of all changes, conversations, etc... because the rules seem to change at will - and the students are rarely notified.

If you have documentation to support your claim......use it!!!!!!!!!!

Good luck

 

has anyone else had problems like this, if you did what did you do to fix it?

 

What a kick in the head! Sorry, man - I wish I could offer something besides moral support. I'll reiterate Nobycane's advice and say document everything (and hang on to it), but I know that doesn't help much now. Best of luck, and hang in there.

 

I had 6 hours of "discrete structures" taken from a JuCo's CS department reclassified as "math" after an initial classification as CS/tech. Since I took the courses to satisfy grad-school pre-reqs and the content really was "discrete math" (the JuCo called it discrete structures and put it in the CS department to mimic the big state 4-year school) I didn't really complain, though it was annoying to have different advisors/degree evaluators interpret courses in an inconsistent manner.

The classification change in 6 hours forced me to take an extra 3 hours of CS/tech.