By LAUREL WILSON, The Daily News, lwilson@bgdailynews.
Like many students at Bowling Green Technical College, Marsha Shorts of Scottsville plans to transfer to a four-year university after earning an associate’s degree.But trying to find out what classes she needs to get into a four-year program has been complicated and time-consuming for Shorts. However, a website launched last week aims to ease the transfer process from a Kentucky community or technical college to a state university.Shorts is interested in enrolling in an online business program at Morehead State University when she graduates from BGTC in December.But when she inquired about transfer requirements at Morehead State, she received a huge stack of course listings that weren’t up to date, she said.“It was a little confusing,” Shorts said. So she was excited when she found out about the new website KnowHow2Transfer.org, which provides students in the Kentucky Community and Technical College System with a clear guide to transferring.“This is a lot simpler to understand,” Shorts said of the website.On the website, Shorts is able to plug in the KCTCS campus she attends and the four-year university she wants to transfer to, producing a list of classes she should take at BGTC to get into the bachelor’s degree program she wants.“Compared to the stack of 80 papers Morehead sent, this is better,” Shorts said. Shorts said she wishes the website had been around sooner so she could have avoided taking the wrong class one semester. Still, she thinks a lot of current and future BGTC students will benefit from the new website.“I think it’s a great idea that they’ve done it,” Shorts said. “It will help (students) plot their degree.” State legislators asked KCTCS and four-year state universities to work together to create the website, which has been a few years in the making, said James McCaslin, associate vice president for academic affairs at BGTC.“It finally came to fruition,” McCaslin said.In the past, students had to keep in touch with their academic adviser to make sure they were on track to transfer, but now they can get consistent and up-to-date information 24/7, he said.“They’ll know from the beginning what classes they need to take,” McCaslin said.Before the website was in place, students had sometimes taken classes they didn’t need or had missed a class they did need, he said.“This should alleviate a good deal of that,” McCaslin said.