Transcripts (Venting)

[kant_get_in]

If a school is going to require that I type out every philosophy course I've taken, the instructor, and the grade I received, then why would they also make me spend twenty dollars to send them my transcript? 

 

Somebody's being lazy and I (we) are paying for it. 

[MadtownJacket]

Because there are thousands of schools in the world, and they may not know exactly which courses are philosophy-related.  Hence, why they make you list them out.

 

Then the official transcript can be used to verify that you didn't lie about your grades, and possibly to see a GPA trend or to see if you failed a bunch of classes that weren't listed from above.

 

Pretty simple, really.

[Loric]

When I was doing my rec letters I had issues remembering the names of courses one of my rec's taught - though I had him for something pretty much every semester of undergrad.

 

I always wonder what they're looking for when they ask for those sorts of things? It's not like they know what the content of the course consists of, so the name can be an indicator.. vaguely.. but only vague at best. Its not like classes are named "10 intensive papers about schadenfreude with a scantron mid term and final with the occasional presentation of the prof's vacation photos."

 

No, that's like "Advanced Comparative Analytic Analysis of High Concepts - 500 level"

Edited January 5, 2014 by Loric

[wandajune]

A lot of the information, especially names of the course instructors, are hard to discern from transcripts alone. 

 

I'm just glad a lot of the schools I applied to accept unofficial transcripts.

[Loric]

Really?

 

Do they require an official transcript upon acceptance...? And of course if they two don't mesh, you're out..? Right..?

 

I have issues believing my froofy art schools were hardcore on "all official transcripts from all schools, even if you received no grades (aka: if you stopped there once while on a road trip to take a piss, we wanna know)" and the less froofy subject programs might not even care to check if it's legit.

[wandajune]

Yes, they require an official transcript upon acceptance.

Edited January 5, 2014 by wandajune

[kant_get_in]

Because there are thousands of schools in the world, and they may not know exactly which courses are philosophy-related.  Hence, why they make you list them out.

 

Then the official transcript can be used to verify that you didn't lie about your grades, and possibly to see a GPA trend or to see if you failed a bunch of classes that weren't listed from above.

 

Pretty simple, really.

 

Why not just look at my transcripts then? The only information that isn't on there is the instructor who taught the course. I can only imagine a few, really insignificant ways that that information would affect my application. 

[DerpTastic]

I'm not sure if philosophy works the same way, but in my field I ran into many of these questions, most of them asked for the textbook as well. I figure it was more the textbook they were curious about, so they could like up what you learned from and guesstimate how prepared you are.

 

Also, I remember reading a thread somewhere where someone mentioned that a class showed up on their transcript without the exact name, meaning the department probably couldn't figure out what the class was. This could help combat something like that.

[MadtownJacket]

Why not just look at my transcripts then? The only information that isn't on there is the instructor who taught the course. I can only imagine a few, really insignificant ways that that information would affect my application. 

 

I've never been asked to list my instructors, but if you looked at my transcript you wouldn't know which classes were quantitative classes and which weren't (I had to list those for my application).  The course titles are vague and most of the time the end of the titles were cut off.

 

Like I said, there are thousands of schools in the world, and not everyone's transcripts are the same.  It makes the process much easier for them if you spent a few minutes and listed out the relevant courses, instructors, and grades.  If we left it up to the admissions committee to do the work, I can imagine they'd be gathering inaccurate lists (which could hurt/help you), and most likely would delay the response times as well.

[kant_get_in]

I've never been asked to list my instructors, but if you looked at my transcript you wouldn't know which classes were quantitative classes and which weren't (I had to list those for my application).  The course titles are vague and most of the time the end of the titles were cut off.

 

Like I said, there are thousands of schools in the world, and not everyone's transcripts are the same.  It makes the process much easier for them if you spent a few minutes and listed out the relevant courses, instructors, and grades.  If we left it up to the admissions committee to do the work, I can imagine they'd be gathering inaccurate lists (which could hurt/help you), and most likely would delay the response times as well.

 

That makes a little more sense. In my case, the transcripts are clear and the course titles are very straightforward (e.g. "Ethics" or "Philosophy of Mind"), but just because the information I provided was redundant doesn't mean that it will be in every case. 

Edited January 5, 2014 by kant_get_in

[Eigen]

Just echoing that not all transcripts are clear. 

 

Half of my upper division courses on my transcript just showed up as- Special Topics, Chemistry with a number. 

 

Would have been pretty useless without me providing the details of what the course contained. 

[philstudent1991]

I take the transcripts to be pretty much just a corroboration of your listed GPA. I gave a brief description of all of my philosophy classes in my CV, and my letter writers also discussed what we did in their classes at least briefly. The transcript on its own tells the reviewer nothing about what went on in a given class.