(This is a followup to my previous screed about SJSU's handling of GE certifications.)

After 32 months, literally 160 hours of concentrated effort trying to figure out what happened, and numerous opinions from the various administrative peanut galleries at both Mission College and SJSU, it would appear that my lower-division GE certification is in effect. Barring some catastrophe, I shall no longer have to take any lower-division general education classes, and have only 10 total credit-hours remaining after this semester.

The lessons I learned? First, assume failure at the receiving institution's end and audit continuously. Second, get copies of everything, and keep bugging them until they give you one. Third, be prepared to build a solid case for every line item on your cert anyway, just in case. Fourth, if at first you don't succeed, escalate.

The General Education Certification

A GE certification is a process enabled by both California State Law and CSU Executive Order. In theory (and the way it's characterized by community colleges in my experience), it is a binding contract between the sending and receiving schools and the student. Students that have a full certification can not be required to take lower-division general education classes to satisfy graduation requirements at all. In the case of a partial certification, whatever areas are checked off get that same treatment (i.e. in a subject area-by-subject area fashion, instead of wholesale).

The completed requirements listed on my Academic Advising Report (upon which many advising decisions are made) never matched the partial certification that Mission College sent SJSU. The opinions as to why this was the case broke down to one of the following:

• Some of the classes were out-of-state.
• It was a partial (and not a full) certification, so it carries less weight somehow.
• I hadn't been patient enough (30 months? really?).
• I had not sacrificed enough chickens to Komodos, lizard god of evaluations and gangrenous limbs.

OK, maybe that last one is a bit fanciful, but it was a real mystery here. It turns out that these were all bogus speculation, as CSU executive order makes no distinctions between full and partial certs and the active (though apparently unwritten) policy is that certifications are to be taken without edits except in very obviously bogus cases.

By process of elimination, that means either that my paperwork never got processed or Komodos is angry with me.

Disclaimer

It is worth noting at this point that the folks I dealt with at/near the evaluations department were very careful not to say anything that might be construed as definitive with regard to their treatment of GE certs. While I believe (and I am neither a lawyer nor SJSU evaluations official) that these certs are contractually binding as characterized by the community colleges and they seem to treat them as such, don't take this as gospel.

Lesson 1: Assume Failure at the Recipient's End

While nobody has been able to confirm what exactly happened at SJSU's end, I was able to get some semblance of an idea. My understanding of the power of the GE certification has not been altered, and I assume (in a vacuum of real answers) that the paperwork was mishandled. My first guess had been that the paperwork had not been sent, and I ended up wasting a month figuring out that the folks at Mission had done the right thing. The lesson here is to be tenacious and assume that the recipient has messed up somewhere until someone proves otherwise.

In particular, have the person who says "I don't see one" scour the entire system--my transcripts languished in an unexpected part of the user interface until the person at the counter finally found it at my insistence. Remember also that these folks have a 6-12 month backlog, so getting your case squared might take some real time.

Lesson 2: Get Copies of Everything, and Bug Them 'Till You Get One

I had assumed when I applied for the full GE certification at Mission that they actually gave me one. It turns out that they didn't at first, and I didn't know that until I got a copy from them by pestering until I got one. In short, getting a copy for yourself shortly after applying for the GE cert from your community college is a Good Idea (tm).

Lesson 3: Be Prepared to Build a Case for Every Line Item, Just in Case

While I believe that a GE cert is relatively iron-clad, the verbiage in the relevant CSU executive order is a bit vague. The heirarchy of "what's acceptable for GE" seems to be:

1. SJSU classes listed as GE-applicable in the catalog. I'm pretty sure someone could sue if SJSU mishandles this one :-).
2. Community college classes listed as GE-applicable on http://artic.sjsu.edu. This list changes on a regular basis as articulation agreements change, so when the class was taken is as important as what class it was.
3. Classes certified by a community college, but not listed on http://artic.sjsu.edu.
4. Everything else.

There is a fairly large legal chasm between items 2 and 3. While SJSU seems to have a policy in place that says there is no difference between them, it is certainly prudent to assume that preparing for the worst is a good idea. Get your documentation in order, visiting the relevant department heads as needed to get equivalence forms filled out while you wait for things to happen.

If you've read this far and have guessed that keeping every class syllabus and catalog description in a file cabinet/folder/whatever and in good order is a good idea, you'd be dead right.

Lesson 4: If At First You Don't Succeed, Escalate

I tried desperately to not involve additional parties in my little problem, but it turns out that this was probably a bad move. My boss rides the train with the university ombudsperson and eventually got us talking to one another. This was a Good Thing, since it lit a fire under the right people and gave me access (and a modicum of authority) to ask tough, direct questions. I can't recommend going up the chain of command when a case has no merit and you're getting an answer you don't like, but if you're not getting an answer at all, go for it.

Conclusion

Having learned to distrust the recipient, get copies of everything, escalate, and especially put in the extra work to build a case for every single line item, you might be asking the question if it was worth it or not. To that question, I'll answer a qualified "yes." Transferring is painful, and your goal is to avoid having to take as many classes as you can get away with. The school, meanwhile, wants (for various reasons) to make you take as many classes as they can get away with. Every piece of evidence you can put together to build your case helps.

That said, the 160 or so hours I've spent on this issue in the last 2.5 years could have been spent on all the work that goes into a typical 4-credit class (or one business month of wages). Depending on your perspective, I've either saved myself three semesters of work (by making the GE cert work) or cost myself an earlier graduation (through time wasted dealing with administrivia). Getting the GE cert in and of itself was a tiny fraction of this time, however, so I suspect that GE certs are generally worth having as one component of the transfer student's toolbox--it's just unfortunate that they can't realistically be the only component.

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to the articulation and ombudsperson staffs at Mission and SJSU for their assistance, along with the Humanities department, my CS department advisor, and my boss for their assistance and support. While I'm disappointed at the opacity and lack of communications of the evaluations process at SJSU, I can't fault the folks I dealt with directly--they were all top drawer.