I am an American student who has completed a Master’s degree abroad. I am currently applying to graduate programs in the United States which required my foreign degree to be evaluated by a third-party. I chose to go with World Education Services to evaluate my credential. This is a relatively long complaint, but for any student or anyone that is thinking of going with WES this might be worth a read.

The WES course by course evaluation report I was issued contained numerous errors including:

1) Assigning two different American grades for the same Foreign Grade. In one case, the higher numeric grade received a lower American grade, while the lower numeric grade (which was the same as letter grade as the first) received a higher American grade. I also received both an A and an A- for the exact same grade in two different places. This occurred multiple times throughout my evaluation. No explanation was ever given for this despite many complaints.

2) Selectively and inaccurately applied WES’ own listed grading conversion scale, by issuing A minuses when their grading scale for my particular university did not have any pluses or minuses. While according to the WES grading scale, as posted on the web, confirmed by their Customer Service Representatives, and by a letter by the Director of Evaluations, indicated that both grades should have been an A.

But even assuming that their grading scale was supposed to include pluses and minuses, then one would assume that all grades that were on the borderline would receive plus and minuses as well. However, this was not the case since WES found that only minuses applied to certain grades, but not others, without any explanation to why this distinction has been made in the first place.

3) Containing spelling errors within the evaluation (which was corrected after numerous complaints).

4) WES failed to provide accurate information distinguishing between two courses received from two different department or schools (something that all transcripts should provide). The course by course evaluation did not indicate what particular discipline did the course fall under. This could be an issue of evaluation standards as a whole, but this was not explained to me through e-mail or over the phone.

5) Failed to give accurate weighting specific to particular courses (such as courses spanning over the course of two semesters rather than one), thereby skewing the entire assessment. For example, I took a year long dissertation unit which spanned over the course of two semesters, but only received one semester’s worth of credit. I contacted my university to confirm that this is the case and told me that all this information on how to interpret dissertation grades are located on the back of the transcript.

The service at the WES was also atrocious. World Education Services:

1) Refused to change the aforementioned errors and replied through an e-mail with the same grading scale that WES failed to uphold or adhere to. Within my letters that I faxed to the Director of Evaluation, I included the grading scale as an example of why my evaluation needed to be fixed. In response, they simply gave me a copy of the very same scale I used to critique their evaluation, while asserting that no changes were warranted. They did not bother to explain why their scale was not followed nor did they bother addressing any other of the concerns that I mentioned before.

2) They sent virtually the same e-mail as a reply to each of the three letters I sent. None of the e-mails they sent explained any of the discrepancies that I found in my evaluation.

3) Customer Service representatives informed me that the same grading scale used on website would be used to evaluate my credentials before and after the fact that WES did not use such scale. One of the main reasons I went with World Education Services was because the Customer Service representatives told me before I filed a request for an evaluation that my credentials would be evaluated in accordance to their grading scale.

4) I was put through to the Manager’s voicemail twice, after waiting 20 minutes on the phone to speak to a representatives only to have both my messages not responded to.


Overall, my experience with WES has been terrible at best. Not only was their evaluation riddled with errors, the Customer Service representatives were enormously unhelpful and unwilling to assist me in any regard except to provide me with either a fax number or the manager’s voicemail. The manager seems to be perpetually “at lunch” or unavailable no matter how long I waited on the phone to speak with him or her. The processing of my complaints would take over a day each time only to be receiving the same half-baked reply every time.

I hope this serves as a warning to anybody seeking services from WES and cannot stress how distasteful my entire experience was with them. Because of school deadlines, I am forced to find another company to do the same job. In doing some brief calls to other companies, I found them to be much more courteous and helpful to any concerns and questions I had regarding their evaluation service. They were also much more forthright and transparent with how my credentials were going to be evaluated. I would not want any future dealings with World Education Services.