Transferring as a graduate

The registrar’s office of Clayton State University does not evaluate graduate credit. If a student is transferring in to seek another undergraduate degree, any graduate courses the student may have completed will not count towards an undergraduate degree at CSU. We do require that the student provide us with transcripts from each college he or she has attended, regardless of the level of coursework completed.

CSU is still a relatively new graduate institution. Our School of Graduate Studies opened in 2006 with the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies. We now offer four master’s degree programs: MALS, Master of Business Administration, Master of Science in Nursing, and the Master of Health Administration.

How is graduate transfer credit evaluated?
Because CSU’s graduate programs are so young, I do not know if the registrar’s office will have any part in evaluating graduate transfer credit in the future. As of now, it is a departmental responsibility. If a student is attempting to transfer graduate credit into one of our graduate programs, that credit goes to the School of Graduate Studies, and it is evaluated by the director of the student’s desired program.

Transferring graduate credit is therefore very circumstantial. The credit a student may receive depends on the type of program into which a student to trying to transfer, the type of credit the student has earns and from what type of program the credit originates, and the opinion of the director.

For example, before I applied to the Master of Arts in Professional Writing Program at Kennesaw State University, I considered taking a few graduate English courses at Clayton State then transferring them later. However, upon consulting the director of the MAPW program, he made it clear that courses such as “Gender and Sexuality in American Literature” and “Studies in Renaissance Literature” would not transfer. Although it would have been convenient for me to take these classes closer to home and delay my move to Kennesaw, I was glad to learn that these courses would not fit into my desired program before I spent money and time completing them.

Residency requirements
The number of hours that can be transferred into a graduate program is also dependent on the program. However, this number is drastically lower than the number of credit hours that can be transferred into an undergraduate program because graduate residency requirements are much greater.

For both the MAPW at KSU and the MALS at CSU, the maximum number of transfer credits is 9, which happens to be equal to one full time semester of graduate study. Both programs also require 27 hours in residency; therefore, three fourths of a student’s graduate coursework must be completed at the school where he or she plans to graduate.

Graduate transient status
It would be highly unusual and unlikely for a graduate student to study at another school as a transient. Because transient students must apply to the new school, the complexity of a graduate school application would make the process extremely arduous, more so than an undergraduate who wants to transient. Deadlines for graduate applications can be more than a year before the semester a student plans to enter, so a transient would have to plan way ahead. It would have to be under very special circumstances with absolute permission from the home institution. Also, the question of the transferability of the proposed transient courses would have to be confirmed by the home institution prior to transient study.