Transcript Research is the brainchild of Peggy Bell Hendrickson.
Peggy Bell Hendrickson worked in International Admissions at the University of North Texas from 2001 to 2009. Her educational background includes Bachelor’s degrees in English Literature and Marketing and a Master’s degree in Interdisciplinary Studies, all from the University of North Texas. Formerly the Assistant Director of International Admissions at UNT, she thrives on researching education systems and schools around the world and has a great deal of fun evaluating international credentials.
She has written several training modules on credentials evaluation and an extensive e-book on researching international credentials. She has presented at the local, state, regional, and national level of NAFSA and is now getting involved in AACRAO by presenting at the state level and writing country profiles for AACRAO EDGE. Peggy thoroughly enjoyed completing NAFSA Academy IV and is a member of the NAFSA Trainer Corps. She was the Secretary/Treasurer of a local NAFSA affiliation, Association of Metroplex International Educators (AMIE) for 2007-2008, and was the co-editor for the credentials section of the NAFSA wRAP-Up Newsletter before becoming managing editor in 2009. She is a member of or volunteers with NAFSA, AACRAO, TACRAO, TIES, and AMIE.
Peggy is currently hard at work on a series of e-books on practical evaluation skills and has just recently completed another major revision of her first e-book, “Researching International Education Systems and Institutions.” She also co-authored a chapter on foreign educational credentials and is a contributing author for the current revision of NAFSA’s “Guide to Educational Systems around the World” and AACRAO’s upcoming revised “International Guide.”
Comments (4) »
When will the revision of NAFSA’S “Guide to Educational Systems around the World” be available?
It is being published, free, online whenever new country profiles are created. You can access it here: http://www.nafsa.org/publication.sec/epublications/online_guide_to
I am a Canadian High School Guidance Counsellor . Over the last couple of years we are starting to receive a number of International Students. It has become a very difficult task to interpret their transcripts from the stand point of understanding their grading scale, system etc. Where do I start?
That is an excellent question! As someone who has worked exclusively with secondary school graduates (both in a university setting and private evaluation companies), please recognize that I’m a little out of my element in answering your question, but I will give it my best shot. You can go a couple of different routes.
The easiest route would be to outsource your credentials to a private evaluation agency. If you’re getting only a handful, and they’re not coming from the same region, it might behoove you to go this route, even though this will incur an additional financial expense at the outset, either to your institution or to the student’s family (though many private evaluation companies do offer discounted pricing to institutions, or so I understand). If your (or your institution’s) goal is to merely ensure that your incoming international students are placed appropriately, this is the most straight-forward, least stressful, and fastest path to that goal. If you decide to go this route, there’s an article on how to choose a private evaluation company under Miscellaneous.
However, if your (or your institution’s) goal is to better understand the transcripts/grading scales/educational systems/educational ideologies of your incoming international students, that’s an entirely different manner. It’s a lot easier if your incoming students are coming from the same region, if not the same country, because there are a lot of similarities to be found in educational systems of countries that were colonized by the same rulers when their formal educational systems were put in place. While my free training on credentials evaluation is based around post-secondary documents, much of the information (especially in Credentials Evaluation Training) holds true, especially with respect to the main types of educational systems, and is a good starting point for getting into the swing of things. If you decide to do your own in-house evaluations, you can go a couple of different routes. The least expensive route would probably be to start building your own library. Doug McBean of the University of Toronto wrote a good article on starting to build a reference library in the December 2006 edition of the NAFSA wRAP-Up http://www.nafsa.org/resourcelibrary/Default.aspx?id=8911
AACRAO sells a series of over a dozen publications called the Handbook for the Admission of International Students to Elementary and Secondary Schools in the United States – http://www.aacrao.org/publications/catalog/handbook.cfm. Obviously, Canada is different than the US, but it’s one of the few series of publications that deal specifically with students who have yet to complete secondary school. AACRAO actually has a large number of country-specific (and sometimes region-specific) international education publications that cover the entire educational system of a country (or region) – http://www.aacrao.org/publications/catalog/international.cfm. NAFSA, too, has a pretty impressive collection of publications for sale as well as the in-progress, free, online Online Guide to Educational Systems around the World. http://www.nafsa.org/publication.sec/epublications/online_guide_to/
Like AACRAO EDGE (http://www.aacrao.org/international/) – a paid and very extensive database of international equivalents, grading scales, and more – the NAFSA Guide isn’t consistent about whether they include credentials prior to secondary completion. Other great publications come from ECE, IERF, and smaller groups. The document Researching International Education Systems and Institutions has a very extensive list of country-by-country (and regional) publications (both paid and free) if you decide to build a library.
In addition, many of the private evaluation companies (AACRAO, ECE, IERF, WES, etc.) offer on-demand training programs that are tailored to your specific needs. This may be the fastest way to get up and running if your institution decides that it wants or needs to expand its understanding of its growing international student population. Training programs are also offered at NAFSA conferences (and the regional conferences are happening all around the US this month and next, so you may be able to find one that’s not prohibitively distant), though most of those deal with secondary school graduates.
I hope these are good starting points.