It turns out there are even more issues that can occur for quite many international students who are trying to get their Chinese degree evaluated by WES. In this episode, I will discuss two important issue that many of my clients experienced: wrong names and passport numbers in the CSSD database.
1. Name
Previously, I said that to do WES evaluation, we need to first of all, figure out the name used by your university when transmitting your degree information to CSSD.
I suggested that you can try to find out the name using CSSD’s query function. By using different variants of your name and your degree certificate number, you will find out the correct name to use when registering your CSSD account.
This works for many. But there are exceptions, difficult exceptions: You found the degree but the name won’t be correct still.
In the case of Akava, we successfully identified his name used for his graduation. We were able to find his graduation information and we assumed that this is the correct name to use. However, it is not the case. We created like 5 accounts (with different passport numbers) but to no avail.
Frustrated, we contacted his school and the school said they used a wrong name for his degree and indeed apologized for the oversight.
His name is Akava but they put Akawa and all in small letters.
What’s more, they only put the first name, not the whole name!
With this updated information, we finally finished his evaluation.
However, please note that since the name on CSSD is different from your passport name, WES will issue a report with the following wording:
I am not a Canadian immigration consultant, so I cannot comment on this with certainty and authority. But my experience indicates that this is acceptable by IRCC. But always consult your advisor!
If you want to fix this issue, you need to contact your school, who would most likely tell you that this is not possible. Contact us if you need help.
2. Passport numbers
The second most important piece of information you need is the correct passport number. It is not your latest passport number because neither your school nor CSSD knows that you have changed to a new passport and you (probably) won’t care to update them.
That’s to say, your degree information is associated with your old passport. If you have only used one passport since your enrollment to date, then congratulations, you can use whatever passport number you have now to register the account.
However, don’t relax just yet. Your school might had made a mistake…
Recently I had a client who has used two passports during her study. So we suspected that either passport number will work. Given that we were able to ascertain her name correctly, we then created two CSSD accounts with the two passport numbers.
Neither worked. We had to reach out to the school.
The school gave us a passport number the student doesn’t even recognize. She has never used such an identity document. I suspected that this number could be some form of ID issued by the Chinese authorities.
What can you do with this? First of all, you might say, let’s fix it then. Update them the correct passport number, easy peasy. However, it is extremely difficult, almost impossible.
Second, you might register an account with the wrong passport number, ask the school to issue a statement, take a photo with it and upload it to CSSD and request them to approve the account. This might technically work as CSSD understands that this kind of situation happens and is more often than not accommodating.
Third, an easier but somewhat risky option is what we used and it worked for this client. However, I won’t disclose it here as it is not what we would normally do. If you need help, please contact us.
One another case that I wish to quickly mention is that the passport number used by your school could be the one you used when applying for the school, instead of the one you used when enrolling.
Conclusion
Mistakes can happen in all kinds of systems. However, due to the often limited proficiency in English and inexperience in handling matters related to international students, your schools might give CSSD the wrong information.
So if your case is simple and you feel like overall you experienced good administrative support while at your university, you can still use the methods I mentioned in early episodes. If otherwise, please contact your school.
Need WES support? Contact: wes@supersecure.site
