Transferring Business Courses from Other Schools

SDSU will generally accept all college-level transfer units from an accredited school, although there is a limit of 70 units total from community colleges. Acceptance of units, however, does not mean that the content of the course will be accepted as equivalent to any specific course at SDSU. To determine equivalency of content, SDSU has to look at what material was taught in the course.

Lower Division Courses:
Courses may be transferred to SDSU from any accredited school. However, transfer courses are considered “units only” (that is, they give a student units towards graduation but do not fulfill any specific course requirements) unless they are approved by SDSU as being equivalent in content to a specific SDSU course or meeting a specific requirement. 
Business courses are considered equivalent to SDSU in one of two ways: 

Articulation. An articulation is a standing agreement between two schools that certain of their courses are equivalent. A student who takes an articulated course at another school will be considered to have met the requirement at SDSU that the course fulfills.

EXAMPLE: Grossmont’s ECON 120 is articulated to SDSU’s ECON 101. A student who has taken ECON 120 at Grossmont College is treated as though he/she had taken ECON 101 at SDSU.

Lists of articulated courses from other schools are available through the web at SDSU's Transfer Admissions Planner at www.sdsu.edu/tap and through the statewide articulation charts at www.assist.org. We recommend that you check BOTH sites to ensure complete information.

Petition. If no articulation exists concerning a particular school or course, the student may ask to have the course accepted as equivalent to an SDSU course. This is done by filing a petition (called a Request for Adjustment of Academic Requirements) with the appropriate department at SDSU and including enough information about the other school’s course for the department to determine that it is equivalent to SDSU’s.

If the petition is denied, the student will need to take the appropriate course at SDSU to fulfill the requirement.

The rules about determining equivalencies for General Education (non-business) courses are somewhat different. Transfer students entering SDSU should request an evaluation from The Office of Advising and Evaluations to determine which, if any, of their transfer courses need to be petitioned.

Upper Division Courses:
There are no articulations for upper division courses in Business. All courses must be petitioned in the manner described above. Please contact the Business Advising Center for information about requirements to petition upper division courses.