Policy Briefs and Reports

In a well-functioning transfer environment, students who transfer should not face barriers. For most postsecondary students in Ontario, however, there are significant challenges related to transfer. Transfer students may spend more time than direct-entry students completing their studies, and a significant number of these students do not graduate (Walters, Brown, Perekh, Reynolds, and Einmann, 2021). Faculty and academic departments play a vital role in this process when they assess transfer credit and make determinations about course equivalencies between two or more postsecondary institutions. And yet, despite this important role, many faculty members have shared that they do not receive guidance on how to make these decisions (Missaghian, 2021).

In response, ONCAT consulted transfer advisors, faculty members, and other key personnel to create guidelines for assessing credit. This resource provides a starting point for faculty members, department chairs, and others who wish to ensure that their decision-making process is fair, consistent, and transparent. We provide common elements to consider that can be adapted to fit the needs of a particular department or discipline. The guide includes principles of credit assessment, guidelines for making credit-assessment decisions, and other information relevant to this important process.

Studying faculty perceptions about curriculum evaluation and transfer can be tremendously useful for policy development, as it has long been a ‘black box’ (Hyatt & Smith, 2020). At a provincial level, by exploring faculty decision-making, we can learn more about potential pathways and barriers for college-to-university transfer. Understanding disciplinary norms in faculty decision-making is an important but understudied face of transfer research. By focusing on a single discipline, we can develop our understanding of the transferability of a high-demand course/elective, like sociology, offered in many college programs. More importantly, we hope this framework is replicable to other fields of study, allowing transfer stakeholders to assess comparability and alignment in course content with faculty perceptions.

In this brief, we address these gaps in faculty/transfer studies by interviewing Ontario university faculty in sociology to explore disciplinary evaluation processes and their potential relationships with transfer. We complement faculty interviews with content analysis of college and university introductory course outlines. This unique design aids in our understanding of faculty decision making in curriculum assessment, the intersection between content creation in practice versus perception, and its implications for vertical transfer.

Regardless of how a transfer system operates, it is fair to conclude that curriculum assessment—the process through which faculty members evaluate and contrast course outlines—plays a key role. ONCAT is interested in learning more about how faculty make decisions on transfer credit and how that evaluative process plays out. To develop a better understanding of faculty’s role in transfer, in the summer of 2020, the research team at ONCAT decided to explore the curriculum assessment process. Our overarching goal here is to develop insights that could inform upcoming ONCAT-funded interview- and survey-based research projects focused on faculty members’ role in transfer.

For this exploratory exercise, we chose first-year introduction to sociology college courses offered in Ontario and taught as part of General Arts and Science diploma/certificate programs.