How long does a credential evaluation take, and which report do schools want?

US schools cannot tell from a Taiwanese transcript how many credits a course carries or what the average comes to on a 4.0 scale, so most graduate programmes ask for a third-party report that restates your qualifications in US terms.

No US government body regulates this, so schools use membership of NACES as the bar instead. NACES is a trade association founded in 1987 and currently lists 18 members; WES, ECE, The Evaluation Company (formerly SpanTran), Josef Silny and IERF are the ones you will see most. Which services are accepted, and whether an evaluation is needed at all, is up to each school, and some departments take official transcripts sent directly by the university, so check before you pay. If you do order one it will get more than one use: the same report serves for licensing exams, employment and immigration, and WES reports have no expiry date.

Reports come in tiers and ordering the wrong one means starting over. The cheapest states only what your degree is equivalent to, with no course list and no GPA; graduate applications normally need the course-by-course version, which lists every subject with credits and grades and calculates a US GPA. ECE charges $199 for Course by Course, $135 for General with GPA and $110 for General; WES starts at $186 for Course-by-Course and $118 for Document-by-Document. ECE's own price page says to ask the institution which type it requires before ordering.

Allow more time at the service than you would think, and note that the two differ a lot. WES runs in two stages: once documents arrive it verifies them, which its site puts at about two weeks, and only then does the evaluation start — about two more weeks for Course-by-Course, up to four for complex cases. That is four to six weeks at WES alone, not a handful of business days. ECE's own home page says around 5 business days, and its fee page offers a guaranteed 5-business-day rush for US$90. Requesting a sealed transcript from your university and the international post come before any of that, so budget 6–10 weeks end to end through WES, or 3–5 through ECE, longer during the November–January peak; with WES, start at least two and a half months before the deadline. One more detail that quietly stalls files: each service issues a reference or application number that has to appear on the sealed envelope or form, and without it the documents often cannot be filed, the status sits at awaiting documents, and nobody tells you.