My First week as Advisor, need your help!

[cookderosa]

Today was my 7th day as academic advisor for XXX college. It is going to be challening but very promising.

The majority of my students are military. I was surprised with the accommodations offered to military learners that allows them to transfer a ton of elective credit. The school takes only 64 credits from ACE and Community Colleges combined and 30 Credits by Examination (CLEP, Dantes, ECE, TECEP). There is no mention of upper level or lower level, however the students are required to take 60 credits from a 4 year institution (CLEP and DDST counts as 4 year credit) 30 of which need to be from our school. So technically you can SL and CLEP up to 94 credit hours, leaving you with 30 credits to complete in residence.

I was very happy to learn that we take PF at face value, without ACE, and the credits count as part of the 60 needed from a 4 year institution we just treat PF as any other RA school! that is awesome!

I want to help my learners maximize their transfer credits so they can graduate. Retention is a key issue we need to improve. While most of my military learners know about CLEP and DSST, they don't take full advantage of them and none of the civilians I have talked to so far have ever heard about CLEP/Dantes or ACE. I finished my degree without using testing, I relied heavily on PF and SL so I don't have first hand experience.

I would like to compile a list of tests as long as the recommended study material and I would like your input. I need to start with some gen eds.
- College Algebra
- English Comp (we take Composition w. Essay as Comp I and II)
- Speech
- US History
- Ethics in America

I would really appreciate your feedback on recommended material and study strategies for those tests!

Very respectfully

Perico

IC Of course!! Seriously, we have an amazing pass rate here. it would be my first suggestion. Second for me is the REA book series. They don't offer online study, but they offer CDs as an option. Options 1 and 2 are for the highly motivated. For the slightly less diligent, I'd have them complete one of the courses at Saylor.org. I've been using these this year in my family as well as in my virtual online study group- they are really good and have an interesting mix of multi-media learning. (free)