Transcript refresher

Sorry for the silence for the last few days.  At the end of last week, Kristen and I went down to New York for a conference on the evaluation of transcripts and other credentials.  It was offered by World Education Services, which is probably familiar to more international students than those in the U.S.  WES calls itself a source of “international education intelligence,” which is an interesting way of saying that they facilitate the admission of international students to U.S. and Canadian colleges and universities by helping those universities understand the prior education of the applicants.

Having enthusiastically signed up for the conference, I started to have second thoughts earlier last week.  Would this really be worthwhile?  We think we do pretty well with international transcripts, and we see so many of them.  Would a day of discussion of Turkey, China, India, Hong Kong, Mexico, Nigeria, Canada, and the Bologna countries really be a good use of our time during a very busy summer?  Well, it turns out that it was.  While my approach won’t change fundamentally, I feel better equipped to evaluate a transcript from a previously unfamiliar university.  Best of all, since we have new application readers every year, I learned about resources to which I can direct them.  All in all, a productive day (plus travel time) even if the blog went through a brief hiatus as a result.