Apostille rejected because the seal is on the wrong document: what to check before you ship it to Korea

Here is the part nobody explains clearly before you start: a diploma and a criminal background check do not travel the same road to get apostilled, and sending either one down the wrong road is why packets come back.

Your diploma is a private document. A university registrar's signature on it is not on file with any state government, so a Secretary of State's office has nothing to authenticate on the parchment itself. In almost every case you apostille a notarized copy, not the original: a university parchment has no state official's signature on file, so it can't be apostilled directly, and a notary certifies a copy first. That means the sequence is photocopy, notarization, then apostille, in that order. If you send your actual diploma to a notary hoping they will "certify the original," you have already gone wrong, because a notary who agrees to stamp a diploma as a certified true copy is doing something they are not authorized to do, and the result is exactly the kind of defect a Secretary of State catches.

Your criminal background check works the opposite way. If you used the FBI Identity History Summary, the document you get back already carries a federal signature. That means the apostille goes on the original FBI document itself, issued by the U.S. Department of State, not on a notarized photocopy of it. Korean immigration requires the federal apostille from the U.S. Department of State on the FBI document itself, so the state-apostilled copy gets bounced at the visa stage. A state Secretary of State has no authority over a federal signature at all, and will simply return the request.

So the rule is not "always send the original" or "always send a copy." It is: match the document type to the office that can actually authenticate the signature on it.

A few more ways the seal ends up on the wrong thing:

1. Stapled apostille, unstapled document. Scan the document without removing the staple. Never pull the staple from the document you plan to submit for apostille. Immigration reads a broken staple as a document that has been tampered with.
2. Vital records sent as plain copies. For an F-6 marriage-based application, the Secretary of State authenticates certified copies of vital records, never a photocopy or scan, and an "informational copy" of a birth certificate cannot be apostilled.
3. Wrong jurisdiction entirely. An apostille must be issued by the Secretary of State in the same state where the document was originally issued or notarized, so a birth certificate issued in California cannot be apostilled by the Texas Secretary of State.

We will be honest about the part that varies: a handful of states accept slightly different wording on the notary's certification line, and a notary in one state might phrase a "true copy" statement differently than one in another. There is no single national template. If your coordinator or the Korean consulate flags your notary's wording, that is normal, not a sign anything is actually wrong with your degree.

Once the document is apostilled correctly, keep both the apostilled document and a few plain scans of it. Your recruiter will usually want copies for the hagwon's side of the E-2 paperwork before the original even leaves your hands.