The vocabulary, translated

A great deal of the confusion is words rather than substance. "College" means different things in different countries. Undergraduate, postgraduate, credit, module, semester, honours, conditional offer — all have local meanings that do not map cleanly onto the system you grew up in.

Ask your child to explain the terms rather than pretending to follow. It is not a loss of authority, and it produces two useful things at once: you understand the system, and they discover which parts they cannot actually explain either. That is usually more of it than either of you expected.