TESC BA Social Science degree plan

[dmjacobsen]

It looks good with a few notes for you to consider:

-You get to use the capstone as UL credit so you can take one less UL course if you want (but then need another LL course). You should also note that TESC might not give you credit for Counseling as part of your degree without you asking for it. Once you take it I'd have them plan it into the degree and make sure you get them to code it for a PSY course instead of COU. See this link:
http://www.degreeforum.net/excelsior-tho...t-psy.html

Thanks! I'd completely ignored the fact that the capstone was upper level. And the thread you linked to mentions that the counseling DSST can be transcribed as an upper division psych course, which means I can possibly switch out two of those ECE's for a less-expensive CLEP or DSST.

-I also would warn about your math course (Foundations of Math), based on the name alone I'd caution you about whether it will work. TESC requires Intermediate Algebra or above and a course called "Foundations of Math" sounds like Elementary Algebra or even something lower. If the course is coded from your original school as college level (i.e. 100+ when three digits or 1000+ when four digits) then you should be good, if it is numbered lower than that then you might have trouble and they may code it as a DEV (developmental) course which would count for no credit. If all else fails you've got ALEKS as you've shown for other courses. You have Intermediate Algebra and Stats listed but might have to add in the regular Algebra course if this one you have falls through.

That class is a 1000-level class at the university I took it at. It wasn't developmental, and was appropriate to use for math requirements at that university, so hopefully it won't be an issue at TESC.

-You have Criminal Justice as a Social Sciences course. The DSST exam is given credit for AOJ-102 which is a Human Services area (not valid for Soc Sci or any other general education area). Since yours is listed as a normal course it may be given different credit but you'll want to watch for that. AOJ courses do not work for your degree and become free electives or simply extra credits.

-You have Police in America as a Social Sciences course. This will most likely be a similar issue to the criminal justice course where it will probably get coded as an AOJ (Administration of Justice) course which will not work on your degree. Using the TESC site I see a lot of courses about police but none of them appear outside of the AOJ category. You can search for course code matches at Thomas Edison State College: Course Offerings

I wish I could find the resource that I got this from, but I found a list of all CLEP/DSST/ECE exams that could be applied to the Social Sciences major. It listed AOJ as one of those areas. That may apply in the major and not in the general education section. If that's the case, then those AOJ courses would go into the major and some of the courses listed in the major would go into GenEd. That source was from another forum, so I'm not sure how valid the course listing is. I'll look out for that, though.

-With the four credit courses you have mixed in you'll have extra credits, note that they do float around and having as an example three four-credit courses will mean that one of your three credit courses isn't used any longer. In this case I'd expect your nutrition course to be one that might not work. NUT (Nutrition) is not a general education elective area, see this link for the complete list: http://www.tesc.edu/documents/Degree_Pla..._12.09.pdf

I wonder if the Nutrition course can't be transcribed in as BIO-208 "The Science of Nutrition" instead of an NUT course. If not, I'll have to consider a backup.

Since you have quite a few things left you are probably pretty safe to wait before you get an evaluation done while you are finishing some exams first, just note that some or all of the things above will take time to either fix or replace in your degree once TESC evaluates your credits.

Good luck.

Thanks for the insight! I'll definitely have to tweak this a little to get it working and will go ahead and put in for my evaluation while I'm knocking out some tests.