At least once during a student's academic career at Penn, they have probably thought it would be easier to transfer to a different school than to suffer through another horrendous exam or presentation.
Though it might sound easy, the decision to transfer is an involved and complicated process.
Each year over 1,600 students apply to transfer into one of Penn's four undergraduate schools. About 20% of applicants are accepted each year.
Associate Director for Transfer and International Admissions Mark Shank said that the Office of Transfer Admissions spends a considerable amount of time examining what type of curriculum the applicant has taken at his or her current school.
Though "we take it on a case by case basis, we want to see that they've taken a rigorous curriculum," including liberal arts courses, such as math and science, Shank said, noting that most incoming transfer students have a current GPA ranging from 3.6 to 3.7.
Their academic records, including the time they have spent at their current schools, must also be free from any failing, conditional or incomplete grades. If they have taken courses that do not award letter grades, the student must have a professor submit a written evaluation of their performance.
Because many colleges award S's ? indicating a satisfactory grade ? the Admissions Office has to know if the student's grade would have been above a C.
Other Ivy League schools have criteria similar to Penn's.
Marlene Vergara Rotner, Harvard's Director of Transfer Admissions noted that Harvard also evaluates each student on an individualized basis.
"Academic preparation for their intended field of study is always one of the first questions we ask ourselves, and most transfer candidates are academically qualified," Rotner wrote in an e-mail interview.
"Beyond that we look at a candidate's ability to contribute to the life of Harvard College ... [and] this analysis is applied to every candidate, regardless of their home institution," she added.
Princeton University is the only Ivy League school that does not currently admit transfer students.
"We don't have a transfer policy ... because there is no space on campus," said Princeton Assistance Director of Admissions Lee Williams.
Princeton, which will increase its class size by 500 students beginning with the class of 2011, has not yet decided whether to include transfer students in this expansion.
Acceptance, though, is only the first step in the transfer process.
According to Shank, the Office of Transfer Admissions is responsible for the preliminary evaluation of each student's course credits ? which includes checking if the student has received at least a C in all courses.
The decision to award credit is then handed over to each school or academic department.
Former Penn State University student and rising College senior Jason Mowery noted he did run into some difficulty in getting credits approved.
The Math Department "wasn't convinced that my MATH 104 coursework at Penn State correlated to Penn's 104 and would not give me credit for it until I passed [MATH] 114," Mowery wrote in an e-mail interview.
Rising Wharton junior Steven Leistner ? who transferred to Penn from the University of Utah ? noted that of the eleven courses he took as a freshman at Utah, Wharton granted him credit for only six.
Once credits are officially transferred, they become part of the student's official record, although the grades received in the course will not be documented, nor will they be used in calculating the student's grade point average.
In the end, many students who have transferred to Penn are happy with their decisions, though they do acknowledge the difficulties in adapting to a new environment.
"I'm very happy socially ? it's been much better than my previous schools, but I do miss the smaller classes and interaction that you can have with professors at a smaller liberal arts school," said rising College senior Elana Caplan, who transferred to Penn from Brandeis University.
Like Caplan, Mowery acknowledges the pros and cons of the transferring process.
"The transition was extremely rough sophomore year ... [but] I also get to be closer to my friends and family since I'm from near Philadelphia," he wrote.
