UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The raw numbers are staggering: nearly 87,000 courses have been added to the Credit Transfer Tool since 2016. More than 90% of reviewed courses have some type of equivalency at Penn State, and over 50% have a direct equivalency to a Penn State course.
Among the 200-plus faculty reviewers, three Penn State professors have completed nearly 20,000 of the transfer course reviews.
What this means for transfer students (and current students looking to transfer in credits) is the hard work completed at other institutions of higher education will translate into better quality credits at Penn State. For the academic discipline communities, this system ensures that courses are evaluated by faculty who are actively working in that field, thereby protecting the integrity of a Penn State education.
“The faculty reviewers have done such a tremendous job to work through the tens of thousands requests we send them,” said Michelle Rice, director of Prior Learning Assessment at Penn State. “We have many faculty who have served in these roles for a long time, who have helped us to establish a system that gets more efficient every year.”
Approximately 260 faculty serve on the review committees of transfer courses. The top three reviewers — in terms of total number of reviews — are Ronald Walker, Harold Hayford and Melanie Hetzel-Riggin. Many more reviewers are over the 1,000 mark.
For Hetzel-Riggin, professor of psychology at Penn State Behrend, course reviews are part of her morning work routine as she starts her day from her Erie, Pennsylvania, home. She has reviewed 6,599 courses as of late March and serves on five different review committees: educational psychology, human development and family studies, rehabilitation and human services, sociology and psychology.