Degree Completion Speed and Information Retention

[GoodYellowDogs]

Here are some rambling thoughts on the subject... some on target, some completely off target... just needed to ramble

I took forever to get my BS. In retrospect, had I had more confidence and less procrastination, I could have done the last 60 units in four months or less easily. I had 60 units from my AS and I had 40 years of business/health/life experience. Had I been confident I could have easily done two tests (or as many as I could schedule) a week because I knew most of the stuff. Do I remember it iall - yes I remember it all because I already knew most of it already. My learnings from studying were more like the frosting on the cake. My BS has depths in Psych and Healthcare. I had enough units I could have had two more depths in History and Photography.

My advice on the confidence piece for a BS/BA for any adult is to compare yourself to the newly minted BS/BA students you know. Do you know as much of them? That's all that's required for a BS/BA. No more, no less. Had I gone into my BS with that in mind I would have taken most of the DSST/CLEP/TECEP/Uexcel without studying. I know, because they work for me, that I'm smarter and more "educated" than most BS/BA grads. Maybe not specific major STEM BA/BS grads, but definitely more than any liberal arts, social science, history, etc. BS/BA grad.

I'm in my MBA program now and was struggling with my first class, which is ironically an undergrad prereq. It's microeconomics (which actually has marketing, psych, etc.), but it also has math. I am afraid of math. So it's a struggle to actually sit down and study something that scares me. The difficulty is in my stinking thinking, not my educational abilities. So yesterday I fell back on my own advice. This is stuff that new grad BS/BA students do early in their college education. I am certainly as smart as they are. Once I finally figured that out, it all became doable. The rest of the MBA should be a piece of cake. I have to study this and remember it, because it's a foundational class. I'm down to the wire and have to finish in 8 days. Go, me!