Please look at my degree progress. TESC instead of Excelsior!! ?? Please advise

[futuremrsmlb]

Hello,
I have been lurking her for a while. I just applied to Excelsior this week. After additional research I think I would be better off and closer to my degree at TESC. Excelsior has receiving all but 1 of my official transcripts and I am guessing it will be another couple of weeks before an unofficial evaluation.
From all that I have gathered on this forum I think I should have applied to TESC instead of Excelsior based on my credits.

Can you look at my previous coursework and offer advice?
I am soooo close (113/120) to a BS Degree in Liberal Studies!

Any help is greatly appreciated!!

[sanantone]

Almost all of your credits will be lower level at any of the Big 3. The liberal arts degree at Excelsior is very flexible. The only thing that might be easier at TESC is meeting the upper level requirement.

[Lindagerr]

I can't think of anyone to give you better advice on degree planning than Sanantone. All I can add is it only cost $75 plus the cost of transcripts to apply to TESC too.

One point about requesting transcripts, many places only charge ~$5/transcript but it is a pain to go through the request process and do it again. Whenever I request a transcript I always ask for at least one additional official copy be sent to me also. That way if you need them again you can put them in one envelope and get them there at one time.

[dfrecore]

I don't know much about Excelsior, I can only tell you a little about TESC. You have a LOT of Lower level credits but not many Upper level, so that's where you are going to have to focus you attention. For both a BA in Liberal Arts and a BSBA in General Management, you have to take a Public Speaking course/exam (DSST has one) and an Info Literacy course/exam (CLEP's Analyzing & Interpreting Literature is supposed to be easy to pass and fits the bill).

After that, for Liberal Studies, you have to take 3 UL courses/exams (DSST has several in the Humanities and/or Social Sciences areas), plus the Capstone.

For a BSBA in General Management, you have to take 10 exams/courses, but all of them can be taken via test or online course. Even though there are more courses, it's actually cheaper to do this because the capstone for Liberal Arts is $1500, while all of the tests/online courses for the Management degree is $100-$150 each except if you took the Sophia Project Management course which is $329.

If it were me, I would apply to TESC and see what your Academic Evaluation looks like. You will want to make sure that any courses you took get transferred over correctly, as they may have a hard time with some of them because they don't have an equivalent at TESC. I had to send in several requests to have them move several courses to the correct category.

Then once you have an online account, you can run a what-if scenario to see what any other degree required. You can do this for any of the degrees they offer, and it's quick and easy.

Anyway, if you have a spare $75, that's what I would do. Good luck!

[futuremrsmlb]

Thanks for all the advice!
I do know meeting UL requirements will be a challenge. In the past I have had schools award LL credits as UL depending on the course. I believe I counted about 15 *possible* UL credits so far (fingers crossed). Only thing I can do is wait for my EC evaluation. I don't have an extra $145 right now to apply to TESC. Will just see what happens

[sanantone]

Thanks for all the advice!
I do know meeting UL requirements will be a challenge. In the past I have had schools award LL credits as UL depending on the course. I believe I counted about 15 *possible* UL credits so far (fingers crossed). Only thing I can do is wait for my EC evaluation. I don't have an extra $145 right now to apply to TESC. Will just see what happens

Excelsior usually won't give you UL credits for courses that were LL at other colleges. Don't be surprised if Excelsior doesn't evaluate all of your credits and tells you to enroll to get a full evaluation. That's what they did to me. None of the Big 3 will give you UL credits for community college courses. I only see one course that will be guaranteed UL credit at TESC: Marketing. TESC may or may not downgrade public relations to a 200-level course.

All of your ACE credits are guaranteed to be lower level at TESC (the stats courses duplicate), except for maybe the TEEX course. They're always changing the equivalency for those, but it won't count as a liberal art. According to Sophia's website, Human Biology will count as Intro to Biology duplicating the Intro to Bio course you took. Wilson CC courses are guaranteed to be LL. From Kaplan, Marketing is UL, I don't know what they would do with Academic Strategies for Business Professionals, and everything else is LL. Marketing won't count as a liberal art, so it wouldn't help if you were to major in liberal studies at TESC. All of the UL credits have to be in the major. From Walden, I don't know what they would do with Social Influences on Behavior or Contemporary Communications, but everything else is LL.

I think you would utilize more of your credits in a business degree.

[Exfactor]

As stated by others most of your credits are LL, you need more UL credits. The liberal arts degree at Excelsior is actually extremely flexible but you will still need a lot of upper level credits.

[dfrecore]

Keep in mind that Excelsior will not accept transfer credits lower than a C-, so your English II and Econ courses are out. TESC also won't accept a D on English II (although they will accept D's on other courses as long as they are not in your area of study). And EC won't accept the CLEP for English Comp, so you either have to take the Uexcel English Comp ($460) or the Straighterline English Comp II course.

Another tricky thing - you will need 30 UL credits in Arts/Sciences, which will definitely be difficult to test out of. There are only 4 DSST's that Excelsior counts as UL. If you are planning on testing out, you'll have to use UExcel exams to get those UL courses, and they can be more expensive than DSST/CLEP's. Some are $95 but many are $345, and there's a $50 testing fee on top of the cost of the exam. Yikes!

Good luck with everything.

[Exfactor]

Keep in mind that Excelsior will not accept transfer credits lower than a C-, so your English II and Econ courses are out. TESC also won't accept a D on English II (although they will accept D's on other courses as long as they are not in your area of study). And EC won't accept the CLEP for English Comp, so you either have to take the Uexcel English Comp ($460) or the Straighterline English Comp II course.

Excelsor accepts "D" grades as long as such is not apart of a degree core requirements. Therefore, the OP English II credit won't be accepted; however, such can be attained by using a TECEP. The Econ course should be approved as credit given that it's not a core requirement for a liberal arts degree, and that the OP GPA is above a 2.0 when the "D" grade is applied.

Excelsior usually won't give you UL credits for courses that were LL at other colleges. Don't be surprised if Excelsior doesn't evaluate all of your credits and tells you to enroll to get a full evaluation. That's what they did to me. None of the Big 3 will give you UL credits for community college courses. I only see one course that will be guaranteed UL credit at TESC: Marketing. TESC may or may not downgrade public relations to a 200-level course.

Excelsior offers two evaluations the "preliminary" and the "official" evaluation. The preliminary just allows you to get a picture of where you credits will be applied; however, in the process they do evaluate all your credits. The "official" evaluation is done by the "department/school" that you're enrolled in. The official evaluation is the only evaluation that counts. Personally, my preliminary evaluation was a mess, but my official evaluation was awesome, as my official evaluation accepted all the credits that my preliminary evaluation denied. So at Excelsior your evaluation is done by two departments.

However, as you stated I think a business degree at TESC maybe more logical for the OP due to the more options of testing out, and smaller amount of required UL credits.

[futuremrsmlb]

Thanks again everyone.
What I have gathered so far:
I need Eng Comp II - I can take this at SL. I have a coupon code for one month free so I will only have to pay for the class ($69)

I will need more UL credits. - I did find in another post that EC gives UL credit for Tor College exams. This is an option I need to explore :-)
Edit: Penn Foster might be my new best friend! They have lots of UL ACE approved credits. Will check with EC on this too.
Thank you again for all of your nuggets of wisdom. I was hoping to be done in 6 months with a BA/BS in Doesn't Matter from I Don't Care Where University. I'm just ready for a degree! Ultimately, I know with God ALL things are possible! I will update once I hear back from EC.