TRanscripts evaluation services

A friend of mine living in the USA once asked me to help him enroll for a distance education course from an Indian university. I helped him do the same and he has completed 2 years of masters in public administration. He is quite happy to have spent just Rs.8000 in tuition fee, correspondance and he flew to India to take up the exams on two occations which could have cost him only about $2000 at most.

Now he is happy that he has gotton himself a very inexpensive degree but wants to convert them through transcripts evaluation services into USA equivalent. I wonder if there is one that is universally accepted.

 

Keep in mind different evaluation services (and even different evaluators within the same company) will vary in their opinion of a program. You also want to make sure they are a member of NACES.

I have used World Education Services, as well as International Education Research Foundation to evaluate my EBS MBA and have been satisfied with both.

 

I had a foreign degree evaluated by WES this year. I chose them because of their reputation -a NACES charter member- and speed of turnaround. It took 5 months of sending documents back and forth from the university for them to finally decide "insufficient documentation" They received transcripts, the diploma, letters from the accrediting agency etc in both English and Spanish. They refunded my money. During this time they rarely responded to my e-mails and when I called by phone the usual wait time was 2 hours to talk to someone and this someone was not the person evaluating the degree.
It was extemely frustrating. I then submitted the same degree materials to another charter member of NACES and received confirmation that my degree was equivalent to an accredited USA degree in 3 days!
So my advice is :if you need a NACES eval and it doesn't matter which agency opt for one of the smaller agencies -where you can actualy talk to a real person if needed and will get much better customer service. WES does 50 thousand evals a year. If you need an eval form a Spanish speaking country I recommend one of the following:
Education International, Inc. (they did mine)
Josef Silny & Associates, Inc.
SpanTran Educational Services, Inc. (my foreign university uses them)
Just from my experience.

 

US Credential Evaluators

WES is serious but very slow. A friend of my brother used it and get the same delay problem. AACRAO is very bureaucratic also.

In Geneva, we used mostly AUAP http://www.auap.com/eval.html in Florida, which is the #2 and Spantran a good evaluator from Texas. http://www.spantran-edu.com/

Hoping it can be of help, however I must point out that many Indian on line universities are not accredited...

 

It's probably best to be careful with AUAP. It's reportedly run by the same people who operate the 'Robert de Sorbon' enterprises. (There have been many earlier threads about that.)

http://www.wes.org/ewenr/06apr/americas.htm

And see the Robert de Sorbon entry on this page:

http://www.maine.gov/education/highered/Non-Accredited/pa-ru.htm

 

Evaluation services are not consistent

About ten years ago, I financed the experiment in which the same person with some unusual credentials (Heriot-Watt MBA; Canadian chartered accountant, home schooling in Guyana, etc.) submitted his application to ten NACES member evaluation services.

The results were all over the board.

The MBA was evaluated as everything from "Not even the equivalent of an American B.A." (ECE) to "Exactly equivalent to a regionally accredited MBA." (4 or 5 others). The Guyana experience as everything from "Equivalent to two years of high school" to "Equivalent to a regionally accredited Bachelor's." That sort of thing.

The only conclusion that I could draw was that there are few if any commonly agreed-upon standards or rules, and, annoying as it is, it may well pay to 'shop around.' It would be great if there were a website where people could share information -- "My MFA from Flapdoodle State was evaluated as the equivalent of a McDonalds Bonus Meal Certificate by the Giznad Credential Service." But that is too much to hope for.

 

The grad school at UF reviews the foreign degree evaluations and decides how many credits they will accept to a UF program. I was talking to some of the staff there when I gave them my evaluation for my HW-MBA to transfer credits into UF.

They told me that they have noticed that the same degree, from the same university, by the same evaluation service, will have results all over the board. It usually comes down to the actual person doing the evaluation, not so much the company.

So it definitely pays to shop around. I would recommend to anyone who is evaluating a master's for transfer to a US program to get evaluations from at least 2 services, then use the best one. In many US programs, you only have the first half of your first semester to transfer any credits. If your evaluator is taking too long, or if you don't agree with the result they come up with, you might miss the window of opportunity to transfer any credits at all.

 

I have had difficulty with World Education Services. Poor response time. Difficulty in reaching anyone there. Incorrect evaluation with no recourse. There are many other agencies out there. Suggest staying away from WES. I have since gotten the correct response need from two other agencies, both accredited.

 

Avoid WES (World Education Services) if at all possible.

 

I agree, I have used WES and ECE. Both have given different evaluations for the same degrees in terms of credits completed. I have completed degrees from Canada and Australia and have completed UK qualifications, the Canadian degrees were evaluated one to one but the UK and Australian qualifications have been evaluated with different number of credits and duration times.

Your best bet is to evaluate with two recognized credential evaluators such as WES and ECE and then submit the one that benefits you the most.

Some people hate WES because they ask for a lot of documents, letters, etc. It is a pain but it is also the most recognized evaluator around. Their evaluations are recognized by most universities and accounting boards.

There are other small ones that are NACES accredited but their evaluations might not be accepted by all.

The nice thing about WES is that your evaluation is stored in electronic format with a copy of all your documents so the employer can get them to back up the report.
I see that some people hate them in this forum but I must say that my employers have accepted their reports with no questions asked.