Last year, I completed my Bachelor’s degree from NYU with a mediocre GPA. I’d like to go to grad school now, but I understand that my grades will be a big issue. I was thinking about going to a community college and take some classes there, do well in them, and then transfer my grades to my NYU official transcript. However, I’m not sure if NYU would take credits/grades from CC.
Does anyone know if it’s possible for me to transfer CC grades to my NYU undergrad record even though I’m no longer an NYU student, but an alumnus?
Probably not. My understanding is that grades from other schools like CC’s are not incorporated into the home college’s GPA. In any event, I don’t think you can swap out grades after you’ve earned your degree. Perhaps you should work for awhile and get some experience in the field you are thinking of attending grad school in and that can balance out your GPA.
Good luck.
Yeah I’d definitely recommend working for a year or two so your GPA is less important. That’s what I’m doing, anyway.
I emailed the Academic Standards team to ask this question, and they informed me that once a degree is conferred, it is impossible for anyone but admission officers to have access to your transcript.
I don’t think lower division classes will help your situation for grad school. Probably better to take some upper division courses at a local state school.
Moving thread out of UAH forum.
While graduate and professional programs will look at all college courses and grades from all schools (regardless of how they are transferred or not between your undergraduate schools), it is unlikely that taking additional community college courses will help in your situation.
PhD programs: mostly concerned about upper level course work in your major, undergraduate research, and recommendations, so additional lower level courses at community college may not matter.
Law school: does not count grades after the first undergraduate degree was earned, according to https://www.lsac.org/aboutlsac/policies/transcript-summarization
Medical school: tends to look down on pre-med courses and grades from community colleges, unless “confirmed” by doing well in pre-med and upper level science courses at a four year school.
When you apply to grad school, you will send official copies of all of your transcripts. If you took classes at A before you started at NYU, and then NYU incorporated those into the NYU transcript, you still would need to send an official transcript from A. Now that you have graduated from NYU, you can’t add anything to that trancript, but if you study at B, C, D, E, etc. then you will have to send official transcripts from each of those places too. What the grad school does with all of those records is up to them. But, generally speaking, newer, better grades will count for more than old bad ones.
Back in the stone age I graduated from an ivy-peer with an overall 2.7, and something like 2.9 in my major. After working a bit at a series of jobs that definitely were wrong for me, I decided to pursue a completely different field of studies and went back to college at my cheap in-state public U. I did a year of classes there as a “senior transfer” and another semester as a “non-degree graduate student”, really hit the books, and ended up with an overall GPA of 3.7 which got me into an excellent grad program in that field. So yes, you can change your fate. But do think through what classes are missing from your current record, which ones a CC class might legitimately replace (that F in a freshman class that you now need a good grade in), and which really ought to be taken at a 4-year institution.