Zero For Effort

I am an admission counselor at an online university. I work in the graduate school, but I sometimes get calls from undergraduate students if there are no undergraduate counselors available.

I get one such call on a very slow afternoon. The student is transferring from another school and wants to know if we received his transcript from that school. We haven’t, so he says he will send in his unofficial transcript tonight. I inform his regular admission counselor that she should receive them soon and figure that’s that.

A few hours later, she comes over to my desk to let me know what happened. The student had sent in his unofficial transcript, but the form just listed six classes with all zeroes. When my colleague called the student to clarify it was the correct form, he said that he’d failed all his classes. She then informed him that it is impossible to transfer credits that you never actually earned.