Students regularly find that they cannot enroll in the courses that will keep them on track for timely completion of their degree. Instead, they have to retake a course at the transfer university because the community college course has not been accepted as equivalent. Such duplication has great impact, because course scarcity and sequencing requirements can force the delay of a year or more in graduation due to a single course being judged unacceptable. The responsible student is at the mercy of a system outside his control. And the system has no mercy.
Articulation exists only for a portion of the curriculum.
There is usually fairly complete articulation for courses from the most important feeder colleges for the most popular majors. But course articulation for students who are not traveling in the mainstream is rare to nonexistent. Thus, the counselor and student can only infer, guess and hope. In many disciplines, there is little or no interaction between university and community college faculty regarding the structure of the ideal curriculum or pedagogy. Instead of direct communication among faculty, university faculty beliefs regarding course content, instructional modalities and evaluation of student mastery are made manifest by requiring students to retake courses.