Not only do colleges charge a fee to mail an official transcript to the university you will attending but they also charge an additional fee for the UNOFFICIAL copy which all they have to do is fax which I think is a bit ridiculous and in some cases the unofficial copy costs more! The unofficial copy only serves a purpose to let the school know that you do indeed have a certain amount of credit hours coming into the school so you can sign up for classes.
Now when I contacted both the offices for UMKC and CMU after faxing my transcripts to verify they had arrived, I got mixed reactions. The first campus I called was CMU and from the get-go I knew I would be having problems with them after calling their Transcript Requests phone number which in fact is a pre-recorded message containing all the information someone may need to know how to send a transcript. Now...I am all for pre-record information because I know how annoying it is when people call for the same information over and over again but to my SURPRISE at the end of the pre-recorded message there was no "If you would like to talk to someone in our office please press 1" it simply just ended the call. Therefore, I had to attempt to call the three individual numbers in hopes of getting one person and finally succeeded and she was ever sooo pleasant. When I asked if she received the fax she complained and sighed and groaned saying she would have to walk down the hall and go check so as this kind elderly woman did so I was stuck listening to the ways that CMU could help further my education. About 5 minutes later she said they did receive it. Out of curiosity I asked when they would be sending it, not expecting it to be Friday but maybe Monday or Tuesday and this was her answer. "Well we have a long line of other people who have sent similar requests before yours but if you want to pay the additional priority processing fee of $20 we might be able to get it out by Wednesday of next week." I simply replied with, "No we won't be paying the additional fee" and hung up. After yelling and screaming and venting to my mother about how amazing the CMU faxing policy is, I took a deep breath...only expecting the worst from a much larger UMKC campus. However, when I called them asking the same information the guy took two seconds to check and said it should be getting sent out either Friday or Monday. Does any of this make sense to you because it surely doesn't to me!*Advice: CMU please adapt your faxing policy and stop trying to charge ridiculous fees. Also lose the attitude because it is unneeded. All you simply have to do is answer our questions, fax our paper and then we will be out of your hair forever as we are off to bigger and better universities.
