I’m currently a student at a local University (not very prestigious) and I am planning on transferring to a better school. I obviously have some requirements to meet in order to meet my current university’s cirriculum for graduation. However, I was thinking of taking harder classes in place for those classes in order to up the rigour of my classes. Has anyone heard of someone doing something like this?
Will you be able to take those classes later if you don’t successfully transfer out?
I did this and it worked out just fine. Of course, this really depends on how you do in the harder classes. At my first university, instead of taking the required freshman introductory one credit course and a freshman critical thinking 2 credit course, I took a 2000 level psych class and 2000 level philosophy class. Alongside these, I took some easily transferrable pre-reqs like English 1102, Math 1113, and Astronomy 1010.
I ended up getting all A’s and one B+ in these courses and just transferred for my sophomore year to a better university this fall.
Be sure that you have a good idea of what courses your potential target schools will want to see and what their graduation requirements might be. If they require freshman English or Comp., then it’s no use taking an upper level English class, as you probably will have skipped an important pre-req.
Remember that while you may do well in a particular class, the school you transfer into may or may not accept the credit. What admitting schools generally do is to request that you provide them with the course descriptions and then they decide what comparable courses will qualify for transfer.
As camover said above, be sure that you have classes that are easily transferable.
Some schools, like the UC’s and CSU’s, will only accept transfers at the junior level, so be sure that you know what the policies are at the schools you’re interested in.