The Official Step
What a Credential Evaluation Does
U.S. jurisdictions require your foreign education to be assessed by an approved service before a board will look at it. It costs a few hundred dollars, it is paid to them, and we earn nothing from it. Here is what you are buying.
Two Things, Not One
An evaluation converts and it classifies. The conversion turns your programme into U.S. semester hours. The classification sorts every course into the buckets a board acts on, accounting, business law, economics, finance, maths and statistics, and everything else.
The classification is the part that decides your outcome, and it is the part candidates never think about when they order one. Two people with identical 126-hour transcripts can land on opposite sides of a 24-hour accounting threshold depending on how four papers are categorised.
It Is Written for One Jurisdiction
This is the expensive detail. NIES groups your coursework according to the rule categories of the jurisdiction you name, a report prepared for one is not laid out like a report prepared for another, because boards count different things.
Ordering an evaluation before you have decided where to apply is how people end up paying for two. Deciding the jurisdiction first is most of the value of a transcript review.
When to Order One
- 01After you know which jurisdiction you are applying to, not before.
- 02After you have closed any obvious coursework gap, an evaluation of an incomplete record just proves it is incomplete.
- 03Before you apply to the board. They will not process your application without it.
If You Already Have One
Send it. A completed NIES report is the best possible input to a review: the hours are already converted and already categorised, so the answer is close to arithmetic. If it was prepared for a jurisdiction you have since moved away from, we can usually still read across from it, with the caveat that the grouping was built for somewhere else.