My best advice to anyone in college.

Keep things from classes. Especially the syllabus and any major papers you write for the class.

Why?

Let me back up and talk about what prompted this. Standing in line waiting to get my sandwich at lunch today I was behind two local college students. There are about three major colleges and a community college in the town we're located in so I'm not sure which schools this guy was talking about. He was quite upset that he was trying to transfer between two of the schools here and the school that he wanted to go to was not going to take 35 of his credits. Understandably he was fairly upset about it and in the end decided not to do the transfer. (Or at least that is what I got out of my eavesdropping.)

What I really, really wanted to tell this guy was that the initial credit evaluation when transferring usually works out that way. Upon first glance you lose a bunch of credits. However, when this happened to me at my third school I was able to get about half of those lost credits put back onto my transcript because I was able to bring in syllabi and papers from the classes that they were not going to allow to transfer.

Typically the reason that a school disallows transfer credits is that they cannot see from the first glance what the course is about. You may know that English Language in America was a writing intensive class that counted for the writing requirement at School A, but School B can't tell that when looking at your transcript so it doesn't count. However, when you bring your syllabus from the class in that shows the ten papers you wrote for the class as well as a copy of your fifteen page term paper and give them either to your advisor or to the transfer office your chances are much better. (HINT: give them a copy because you may not get the original back!)

This process is expedited if you have the syllabi from the various classes you have taken, but in the case where you don't have it still you can try to email the professor and get a copy. This will be much for feasible if the class was in the past year; beyond that gets iffy. I realized that when I was missing the syllabus for one class (arg!) that I had taken five years previously and the professor had a new computer by then that didn't have any of the old syllabi, etc from his old computer and old classes. With no proof that the class was more than the transcript said it was I ended up having to re-take it at College #3. (This should also be another reason not to take eight years and 180 undergraduate credits across three colleges.)

Moral of the story: Make a folder for all your old syllabi. Keep it until you graduate from college... maybe longer. You may thank yourself someday.