TESU 100% Test Out Degree Plan Check (BA Social Sciences)

[sanantone]

My advice is to choose the type of course or test that appeals the most to you. For example, I can study and pass a test much faster than I can complete a Straighterline or Study.com course. I also find the Study.com and Sophia videos to be boring and torturous to get through. My plans were designed before Study.com started getting its courses ACE-approved, so their courses aren't included in my plans. Study.com is about the same price as taking a CLEP or DSST, depending on your center's test administration fee, if you take two courses in a month. If you take one course per month, then Study.com is more expensive. All of my plans include almost all of the applicable Straighterline courses. Straighterline is cheaper than CLEP and DSST if you complete three or more courses per month or have some kind of discount code. Sophia and Tor College Credits are significantly more expensive than CLEP and DSST. ALEKS and Saylor have some courses that will help fulfill the general education and free electives requirements. ALEKS has no social science courses and Saylor only has a few. Unless you already know pre-calculus and stats, those ALEKS courses will require more work than your average college course. You also have to be careful because Saylor's psychology and sociology course are less than three credits. TESU is currently giving a waiver for the last ethics credit when you take the Insurance Institute course. However, they may not continue to do that. TESU is always changing policy. You won't lose money if they decided to make you take at least three credits, but be prepared to complete an alternative test or course.

Keep in mind that you may need 30 to 60 graded credits to get into a decent graduate program.

[dropout2PE2BSBA]

First, it's almost impossible for someone else to tell you if the courses you've picked are "good" or not - it is entirely dependent upon what YOU are good at. If you picked a bunch of history courses (which I personally enjoy), but you don't really like them, then I might say your plan is good, but it might not actually be good FOR YOU. Therefore, you need to decide which courses/exams will work best for you.

That being said, I would not do all of those business courses if you enjoy Social Sciences (except maybe Microecon, just on the theory that it's interesting to see why people do the things they do, but even then, it's a stretch). I wouldn't take Financial or Managerial Accounting, or Microeconomics, or Business Law, unless it was absolutely forced on me by my degree (it was by the way, and I still didn't enjoy them, or are not enjoying them currently). Take some courses you will enjoy more, or you will never finish your degree!

Also, I noticed that almost all of your credits will be done through CLEP/DSST. I'm not sure if you know all of the other ways to get credits, but there are a TON out there, and many of them are cheaper than the exams you list. For instance, you can take the Intermediate Algebra ALEKS course for $20. And if you can pass College Algebra, Precalc and Stats in that same month (or even in the next couple of months), that's certainly cheaper than taking the CLEP exams. If you're military and just want to do DSST/CLEP, then by all means do it, but there are certainly better options to take other types of courses if you're open to other ways of doing them.

Also, Shmoop has some history courses that are currently $25 for a subscription for this month. Which means if you could complete all 3 courses, it would cost you a whopping $25 for 9cr. That's a great deal. US History I, II, and Modern European History - and the last 2 have a lot of duplication, meaning European History course is easier to take because of that.

There's also SL, Study.com (with a 20% off coupon), Saylor ($25/course), NFA (free), Insurance Ethics (free), TEEX (free), etc. Lots of ways to get your credits for less. If you enjoy history, Study.com has The Civil War & Reconstruction and The American Civil War Era (both LL, but don't duplicate) - this sounds much easier to me, as you're killing 2 birds with 1 stone.

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In looking at your courses/exams, I can answer some of your questions:

1) College Algebra is not needed, College Math is fine

2) Intro to Computing DSST/INfo Systems CLEP duplicate each other. But the Comp Sci course at Saylor or the Computer TECEP do not overlap any of those and can all be used. You can also take the Intro to Computing or Info Systems course at Study.com

3) Rise & Fall of the Soviet Union has been changed to History of the Soviet Union, and content has changed fairly recently

4) MIS DSST is UL (but doesn't matter since you need 18cr of UL in the AOS, and no other UL courses matter at TESU)

5) Fundamentals of Counseling DSST is LL

6) History of the Vietnam War is UL

7) You won't need to do the Cornerstone since you're transferring in all of your credits except the Capstone

8) Lifespan duplicates Human Growth & Dev

9) Order of first business courses: Intro to Business, Supervision, Management, Marketing

Thank you for your in depth and much appreciated feedback.

I do like history and chose many of these courses for that reason.

Preferably I would not want to take the business courses either, but as I was going over my options (solely CLEP and DSST) there wasn't much else to choose from.
The only reason why I was not including saylor, study.com, NFA, etc was because I am unaware on how grad school admissions would look at those. Do you have any insight to that? Will that be a hinderance in me being accepted?

1) Good news

2) If this will not hinder grad school admissions I will do this

3) Bad idea to take it? Has it gotten more difficult/less targeted study material and feedback compilated?

[sanantone]

Thank you for your in depth and much appreciated feedback.

I do like history and chose many of these courses for that reason.

Preferably I would not want to take the business courses either, but as I was going over my options (solely CLEP and DSST) there wasn't much else to choose from.
The only reason why I was not including saylor, study.com, NFA, etc was because I am unaware on how grad school admissions would look at those. Do you have any insight to that? Will that be a hinderance in me being accepted?

1) Good news

2) If this will not hinder grad school admissions I will do this

3) Bad idea to take it? Has it gotten more difficult/less targeted study material and feedback compilated?

Read my last post. It's going to be more difficult for you to get into a good program without many graded credits whether you're using CLEP, DSST, Straighterline, or any other non-traditional source.

[jsd]

Tor College Credits are significantly more expensive than CLEP and DSST

This is generally true, but many of their newer course are only $99+$25 ProctorU fee, making them comparable to CLEP/DSST.

That being said, I wasn't impressed with the one exam I took with them, and wouldn't be inclined to use them again if other options were abailable.

But since their test, at least the one I took, was just pulled from a test bank somewhere and not developed on their own, there's probably a ton of variation between subjects.

[dropout2PE2BSBA]

Read my last post. It's going to be more difficult for you to get into a good program without many graded credits whether you're using CLEP, DSST, Straighterline, or any other non-traditional source.

Got it. That is what I unfortunately was assuming.

Any chance you know of anyone that is on this board that got into a decent grad school without any credits or minimal (15-30)?

[bjcheung77]

Read my last post. It's going to be more difficult for you to get into a good program without many graded credits whether you're using CLEP, DSST, Straighterline, or any other non-traditional source.

That's so true, for many schools, if not all, they'll want some "hard grades" for the last 30 to 60 credits of the undergrad degree.

Got it. That is what I unfortunately was assuming.

Any chance you know of anyone that is on this board that got into a decent grad school without any credits or minimal (15-30)?

But fortunately for you, there's this forum. Haha, when it's time for a Masters Degree, you can get an MPA that has Regional Accreditation and also programmatic or secondary accreditation. In essence, it will probably be the cheapest degree I have ever found for an MPA and it would have "more recognized accreditation".

Then there's the chance of a law degree entirely by distance, if you're in California anyways, but if not.... which state are you in? There might be some elsewhere.
Lastly, for the Masters with International Affairs, I've seen a few, but not sure if it's the same as a MBA with International Management you're looking for or a Masters of International Affairs like in Peacekeeping or something like that.

[dropout2PE2BSBA]

That's so true, for many schools, if not all, they'll want some "hard grades" for the last 30 to 60 credits of the undergrad degree.



But fortunately for you, there's this forum. Haha, when it's time for a Masters Degree, you can get an MPA that has Regional Accreditation and also programmatic or secondary accreditation. In essence, it will probably be the cheapest degree I have ever found for an MPA and it would have "more recognized accreditation".

Then there's the chance of a law degree entirely by distance, if you're in California anyways, but if not.... which state are you in? There might be some elsewhere.
Lastly, for the Masters with International Affairs, I've seen a few, but not sure if it's the same as a MBA with International Management you're looking for or a Masters of International Affairs like in Peacekeeping or something like that.

Which MPA program?

I'm in New York, but which law school?

Really any International affairs program that will make me competitive to be a Boren Fellow.

https://www.georgetown.edu/academics/int...al-affairs

[jsd]

The california online law schools are not approved by the bar and you wouldn't be able to sit for the bar exam in NY or practice as a lawyer. There are also a lot of other hoops to jump through to do it. They're cheap, but that's because they're useless.

[dfrecore]

This is one of those cases where you need to begin with the end in mind. If you want to complete your degree at TESU and then move on to a specific type of program, you need to figure out what the requirements are for that type of program. Then, make sure you incorporate that into your degree plan. Get some credits the traditional way (graded, from a Regionally Accredited school), while you're doing the rest of your credits through testing.

If you don't need CLEP/DSST exams exclusively, that certainly opens up what you can take.

[dropout2PE2BSBA]

Seeing how there is no longer a BA in social sciences. What needs to be changed on my plan?