Transferring to UMD means starting your planning work before you get to campus, because the first decisions you make about which credits to petition and which requirements to prioritize will shape the next two or three years. Transfer students who arrive without a clear plan of their remaining semesters routinely discover mid-way through their first UMD semester that a prerequisite they thought was satisfied was not articulated, or that a course only offered in the spring has just closed and they will wait a full year for the next seat. This guide walks through reading your TSAP, identifying what you need to petition, and building the remaining-semester plan that keeps you on track.
What the TSAP is and how to read it
TSAP stands for Transfer Student Achievement Program. It is UMD’s process for evaluating and posting academic credit earned at your prior institution. Once UMD receives your official transcripts, your transfer credits are processed and appear in your Testudo account under Student Records → Transfer Credit Evaluation. Each course from your prior institution is listed with one of three outcomes.
The first outcome is a direct match: your course was evaluated and matched to a specific UMD course equivalent. For example, Calculus I from most four-year institutions or community colleges becomes MATH 140. If you see a specific CMSC, MATH, CHEM, or BSCI course code next to your transferred course, that credit now counts as if you took that UMD course. It will appear in your uAchieve degree audit just like any other course on your record.
The second outcome is a departmental elective: your course was accepted for credit but was not matched to a specific UMD course. These entries appear as “DEPT ELEC” with the department code and credit hours. Departmental elective credit counts toward your total credits and may count toward elective requirements. It does not satisfy any named course requirement unless you petition successfully. This is the category where the most value is hidden: many courses posted as DEPT ELEC could satisfy a named requirement if you submit a content-equivalency petition with the syllabus.
The third outcome is that the credit was not accepted. This happens for courses without a clear academic equivalent, courses from unaccredited institutions, or courses the department determined did not meet UMD’s academic standards for that subject area. Vocational courses, certain remedial courses, and institution-specific courses with no academic transfer value fall into this category. Not much recourse exists here unless there was a processing error.
Courses that typically articulate without a petition
Calculus I and Calculus II from four-year institutions and Maryland community colleges almost always match MATH 140 and MATH 141. If you came from a Maryland community college (Montgomery, Prince George’s, Howard, etc.), UMD has formal articulation agreements with those schools that specify exact equivalencies. You can look these up on the UMD Transfer Credit Equivalency guide at transfer.umd.edu before you even arrive.
General Chemistry with lab from any accredited four-year institution typically matches CHEM 135 or CHEM 131 depending on which sequence the course belongs to. Introductory biology with lab matches BSCI 105 or BSCI 106 in most cases. English Composition satisfies FSAW (the Academic Writing Gen Ed) at most institutions, though you may need to verify the exact designation in your transfer evaluation. Introductory-level CS courses taught in Java or Python typically match CMSC 131 or are evaluated case-by-case for 132 placement. Physics I and II with labs match PHYS 141 and PHYS 142 from most institutions.
Community college courses sometimes transfer at the 100-level even when the content is equivalent to a UMD 200-level course. This is a common frustration for transfer students. If you took Linear Algebra at a community college and it was posted as MATH 1XX rather than MATH 240, that is a petition situation. Bring the syllabus and ask the MATH department to evaluate it for 240 equivalency.
Petitions: what to pursue and how
A course substitution petition asks a UMD department to accept a course you already took in place of a named course they require. Petitions that commonly succeed include math courses at equivalent levels (Linear Algebra posted as MATH 1XX petitioned for MATH 240), science courses with identical content where only the course number differed between institutions, writing courses that satisfy the FSAW requirement yet were not automatically mapped, and Gen Ed courses at your prior institution that were not mapped to UMD’s Gen Ed categories.
To submit a petition, go to the department that owns the requirement you want to satisfy. For a CMSC requirement, contact the CMSC undergraduate office. For a Gen Ed petition, contact the General Education office in the Provost’s office. You will need the syllabus from the course you want to substitute (get it from your prior institution if you do not have it), a written explanation of how the content maps to the UMD requirement, and in some cases your advisor’s signature recommending the substitution. Submit petitions in the first two weeks of your first semester at UMD, not at the end of your second year when you are trying to graduate. Petitions take time to process, and a pending petition can create a hold on graduation application if it is not resolved.
Your first advisor meeting: what to bring
Your first meeting with a UMD academic advisor should happen before or during your first week of classes, not after you have registered for your first semester. Bring your TSAP printout from Testudo, syllabi for any courses you plan to petition, and a draft plan of your remaining semesters in Orbit. You can share a read-only link to your Orbit plan directly with your advisor, which is significantly more useful than describing it verbally or sharing a screenshot. The plan should show which transferred courses you have logged, which requirements they satisfy, and which semesters you plan to complete your remaining requirements.
Come with specific questions. Which courses in your major are only offered in the fall? Which courses have strict prerequisite chains where missing a semester creates a cascading delay? Are there any courses in your major that are typically oversubscribed, where you should register the moment your window opens? Advisors answer these questions every day; they know which KNES course has 50 students fighting for 20 seats, which BMGT elective was cancelled two years running, and which CMSC prerequisite exception is commonly granted. Get that institutional knowledge in your first meeting.
Building your remaining semesters in Orbit
Once you have your TSAP and have had your first advising meeting, log your transferred courses in Orbit under your course history. Orbit’s degree audit will show you which requirements are satisfied, which are in progress, and which remain open. For most transfer students, this reveals two or three years of remaining required courses plus whatever Gen Ed categories were not satisfied at your prior institution.
Build your remaining semesters explicitly: assign every required course you still need to a specific semester, check that prerequisites are sequenced correctly, and verify that you are not planning a course for a semester when it is historically not offered. A two-year plan built this way at the start of your UMD enrollment is far more useful than a vague idea of what you are going to take. Transfer students who build explicit plans in the first month are the students who graduate in two to three years as intended. Transfer students who do not are the ones emailing the department in their senior semester asking about a course they did not know was required.