I am going to start my freshmen year next semester in a 4 yr. college, but I don’t really know the difference between GPA and credit.
I plan to major in chemistry but since it’s an impacted major I have to do some prerequirements, however because I don’t have any AP credit that I could transfer I am two classes behind (Calculus and Physics). I was planning to go to summer school at a community college to clear them out because it’s cheaper, but I read that many colleges transfer the credit but not the grades, so what do they mean by that? I thought that depending of your grade you got your credit…
When they say the credit transfers but not the grade, that means that credit for the class will be given at your institution but your GPA at the school won’t be affected one bit. So let’s say you make straight Cs in all your community college classes that you transfer, but make nothing but As at your home university, then you’d graduate with a 4.0 your senior year.
They do this because they have NO way of gauging whether the demand and difficulty of your community college class was up to your university’s standards. So you could have the community college class from hell because that’s how the department teaches it there, but how would the university know that? So they’ll just throw the grade out and let you be on your merry way for future class.
I should note that even though the grade doesn’t transfer directly, you’ll still probably end up with a transfer GPA, a university GPA, and an overall GPA. This affects you not one bit if the bachelor’s degree is as far as you plan to go. But if you plan to go on to grad school, they WILL see all your grades from the entire time you were in college and they very well may consider your overall GPA and not just the institutional GPA. So if you did bare minimum in your community college but put forth nothing less than As at your home institution, your 4.0 could very well end up a 2.0 or something around that!
They give you credit for the classes (depending on your grades, among other things), which means you can use them to meet graduation requirements. However, they calculate your GPA without considering the grades you got at the other school. Your grades from the other school won’t show up on your transcript at the new one. It will say “TR” or something rather than showing a grade. (This is why graduate schools and other programs will usually ask you to submit transcripts from every college you’ve attended.)