Need guidance, combo traditional and tests possible?

[mednat]

All from 2 year/community colleges.



I'm good with all traditional/online courses being with the same school, but possibly I would want to do some alternative credits (ALEKS/CLEP/etc) at the same time as traditional classes. I just spoke with COSC, they're a bit higher per credit hour than UMUC, but it sounds like I could get my Associate's from them for about $1500 if I use ALEKS for my Algebra. I'm honestly not sure how much I could test out of, I'm not the greatest student in the world and my memory is atrocious. ALEKS looks really good (did the trial last night), and I have two high school seniors, so I think I'm going to do a year family membership and have the kids do some credits through there, as well.

I definitely should have explained my post a bit more. Sorry about that!

Don't underestimate your ability. Aleks, straighterline, schmoop and many other sources are open book! This helps alot for those of us that hate memorization.

Most of the Big 3 have extremely high (or just normally high) cost per credit hours on their traditional classes. Most of us only take what's absolutely required from these schools. Usually this will be a cornerstone and/or capstone. Sometimes a degree plan will have a particular class that is required but not offered anywhere else. The key is, as a norm, we don't take classes at the schools we graduate from. Pretty strange right?

We have alot of reasons for doing it this way. The most obvious is cost. If we can shop around, we can almost always find a class to fullfill a requirement much cheaper than offered at our host school. Second, would be we prefer the material/teacher from a specific source. Maybe you found a class in a specific subject that fits in your plan that is taught by a harvard professor at harvard extension and want to pay the cost to take it.

With all that said, most of us take an enormous amount of non-class non-traditional credits (CLEP/ACE/DSST/etc). This is the reason we choose schools from teh big 3. Even at the extremely high rates per credit hour for the classes we must take at our schools, our total per hour rate is REALLY low when we use non-traditional credits!

Back to my recommendation of COSC specifically. Alot of students have some sort of financial aid (pell, or whatnot). COSC is the only school in the big3 (that i know of) that has setup consortium agreements with other schools specifically for students. What the heck is a consortium agreement? It basically allows you to take a class at another school and use your financial aid funds that have been awarded to COSC. So the basic idea is COSC gets your Pell/fafsa money, they send it to the cheaper school you found classes at.

This is a much different way to look at and shop for school when compared to your average student, and I should have explained better when I threw out my suggestion. Hopefully this clears it up a bit, if not let me know!

If you don't have FAFSA funds to use (or will need to take a loan), I'd suggest giving TESU a harder look, they tend to be more accepting of non-traditional sources of credit for upper level requirements (basically it's easier to fullfill the requirements with non-class credits).