Every year a large number of qualified people are told, politely, that their degree does not exist. Not that it is inadequate, not that it is from the wrong institution, simply that the body assessing it cannot confirm what it is looking at. Most of those rejections have nothing to do with the education itself. They come from paperwork that arrived in the wrong form.
A WES credential evaluation is the most common version of this process for anyone moving to the United States or Canada with a foreign qualification, and it is unusually strict about documents. Understanding why it is strict makes the requirements much easier to meet.
What a WES Credential Evaluation Is Actually Checking
The evaluation answers one question: what is this qualification equivalent to in the destination country's system. To answer it, the evaluator needs to know three things with certainty. Which institution issued the award, whether that institution was recognised by its own national authority at the time, and exactly what the holder studied and achieved.
That last part is why transcripts matter more than diplomas. A degree certificate says you graduated. A transcript says what you actually did, course by course, with hours and grades, which is the only material an evaluator can convert into credits. Applicants who send a beautifully framed certificate and no transcript are the single largest category of delayed files.
Why the Documents Have to Come From the Institution
The requirement that trips people up most is that academic records must usually travel from the issuing institution directly to the evaluator, in a sealed envelope or through a verified electronic channel. Photocopies you supply yourself, however genuine, do not satisfy it.
This is not bureaucratic theatre. Academic fraud is a real and well-documented industry, and an evaluator who accepted applicant-supplied copies would have no defensible basis for the equivalences they issue. The current list of what must be sent, and in what form, is published by World Education Services in its required documents guide, and it varies by country of study, which is the detail most applicants miss.
Where Translation Fits, and Where It Does Not
If your records are not in English or French, they need a translation, and the rules here are narrower than people expect. The translation must be complete, meaning every stamp, seal, marginal note and handwritten annotation is rendered rather than skipped. It must be literal, so an evaluator can map it against the original. And it must not attempt to convert grades into the destination system, because that conversion is the evaluator's job and doing it for them looks like an attempt to influence the outcome.
Word for word literalness is a virtue here in a way it almost never is elsewhere. Good diploma translation services know this and will hand back something that reads slightly awkwardly on purpose, with a certification statement, the translator's credentials and the date attached. Anyone who offers to tidy up your course titles into recognisable equivalents is doing you harm.
A credential evaluation stalls on details most applicants consider trivial, like a missing seal or an inconsistent date format. Web forms fail in exactly the same way, quietly losing people at the one field nobody thought to check. That parallel is why conversion rate optimization spends so much of its effort on the steps users abandon rather than the pages they praise.
Apostilles Are a Separate Process, and the Order Matters
Legalisation and translation are frequently confused, and the sequence is where money gets wasted. An apostille certifies that a signature or seal on a public document is genuine. It says nothing about content and nothing about any translation attached to it.
The practical consequence is that an apostille obtained before translation authenticates the original document, while one obtained after may authenticate the translator's signature instead, which is a different thing entirely and not always what the receiving body wants. The framework behind all of this, set out in the Apostille Convention, is worth ten minutes of reading before you pay anyone. PoliLingua's comparison of apostille versus certified translation covers the ordering question directly and is the clearest short explanation of it I have seen.
The Language Test Is a Different Requirement Entirely
A credential evaluation confirms what you studied. It does not say anything about your current language ability, and no evaluation report will substitute for a test score. Employers, licensing boards and immigration authorities each recognise different tests, and the one your university accepted a decade ago may not be the one that counts now. Choosing a language proficiency test should be driven by which body is going to read the result, not by which exam is cheapest or soonest.
How to Avoid the Three Month Delay
Almost every stalled application shares one of a handful of causes. The institution was contacted at a general enquiries address rather than the records office. The name on the academic record does not match the name on the passport, and no supporting evidence of the change was included. A partial transcript was sent because the applicant assumed only their final year mattered. Or a translation arrived without a certification statement, which makes it unusable no matter how accurate it is.
Start by writing to your institution's records office and asking, in writing, what they can send and how. Do that before you open an application or pay any fee, because their answer determines your timeline more than anything on your side does. Then commission diploma and transcript translation services once you know what documents will actually exist, rather than translating the copies you happen to have in a drawer.
None of this is difficult. It is just unforgiving of guesswork, and the people who get through quickly are simply the ones who asked what was required before assuming.