There are many accredited credential evaluation services that claim to translate your scores from an international standard to a GPA system. They use a simple conversion scheme and somehow make your non-standard grades standard. I came across two such services that are a pain to use, provide an absolutely terrible service, and charge loads of dollars to do something that can be done with a pen and paper, or mentally within seconds.
My first such experience was with WES (World Education Services) that took over a month to deliver the converted grades that was supposed to be done overnight using an expedited service for which they charge an additional $195. It turned out that my documents were incomplete and instead of requesting all incomplete items at once, I had to mail them each missing item one by one, and on receiving that, they would request one more document. After a month of these painful document exchanges, I called them up and asked them to just cancel the whole thing and refund my money, and voila!, the same day my evaluation was complete and mailed out to all the universities despite a missing document.
The conversion system that most universities use for converting grades from India is basically that anything above 60% is equivalent to an A, 50-60% gets translated to a B, and below that is an F. I am not opposed to these services charging hundreds of dollars for doing such a simple conversion, but when they provide a crappy service on top of that, it becomes an almost useless exercise.
My second experience is ongoing with ECE (Education Credential Evaluators) which is no different. The default method of payment on their website is to basically print out the application and write in the payment information on a piece of paper and mail it out to them. Besides being extremely unsecure and time-consuming, I don’t really see the point of them having a website at all. Why not just tie your VISA or Mastercard details to a pigeon’s leg, and send it out to these people. And since you don’t know when the pigeon landed, naturally you would call them up to find out, wait in a queue for half-an-hour, and then hang up out of disgust. For some reason, they never have any customer service agents that are free. This indicates that the process is broken and something should be done to fix it. They don’t provide a charity service - it’s a proper business and should be run as such.
So if you’re reading this and thinking of choosing a credential evaluation service, I would urge you to just drop the whole idea altogether. If a university is insistent on having your grades converted through one of these services, because they don’t have the basic mathematical skills to carry out simple calculations, then that university is probably not worth your time. Look at other greener pastures.
