Credit for Industry Certs

[siersema]

Well I do not know what school you go to then. If you take a state school (practically anyone can get into), then you would not be able to test out of the 3 years of core classes.

Maybe if you do an online program or whatever, but even if you could, would it be worth the time and money? Would the degree really be worth as much as a traditional 4 year degree? Nope. All the factors I have talked about are going to come into play here. Accreddiation, employability etc.

For every clep I take at my school, I have to get 3 people to sign off on it. Most colleges only accept CLEP, and most schools are not going to allow you to clep anymore then 2 or 3 courses.

GRE is used for graduate school entrance, there is no testing out of a degree. That is absurd. If that was true, anyone could take a GRE course that teaches you how to crack the GRE, and everyone would just go ace the GRE. Then they would have a meaningless 4 year degree.

I promise I'm not making this stuff up. Many (hundreds+) colleges take more than just CLEP. DANTES and ECE are widley accepted. Yes, you can test out of an entire degree at an accredited school, Regional Accrediation infact, often called the gold standard. The three schools I'm aware of are Excelsior, Charter Oak State College, and Thomas Edison State College. DePaul seems to have a very liberal acceptance, as does Athabasca (Canadian). Two of the three are indeed state schools. As for the GRE, the GRE Subject exams can count towards credits at various schools. Excelsior awards from 3 to 30 credits depending on score (very high score for 30 obviously), and Charter Oak also awards a very high number. Would these be worth as much as a traditional degree? Well, first off lets break it down to which degree and assume it's that Liberal Arts degree you've already said has no value. So we've got a LA Bachelor in General Studies from say Indiana University or a BS in General Studies from TESC or BS in Liberal Studies from Excelsior. All 3 are Regionally Accredited degrees so the HR person that just wants to know if you have a legit degree can check the box, all 3 can get you into a graduate program (many graduate programs look at GPA, but don't care what your major is) so you're safe in academia, so yeah I'd say they do have pretty close to the same utility given the same major. Given the 3 schools I mentioned someone would probably only go with Indiana first for employment just based on name recognition. But if my example was some small, but traditional school, vs one of the other 3 I'm not sure that the traditional school would really have any more utility. They aren't going to know 'how' the degree was obtained any more than your future potential employers are going to know that you CLEP'd out of a few things. Those of us with online degrees don't have to put 'online degree' on our resume and it's not on our transcripts, or our diplomas. The 'bias' some HR departments have would never impact us unless said HR person was very familer with the schools we listed.

and now lets say someone questioned my use of CLEP's to obtain a degree (though I haven't done that many), your school has given me cover. I can say hey.. you know Spazz's school is pretty awsome and all take a look at them they also accept the same CLEP's I've taken, so they must agree that the CLEP's are equal to their own courses, they just disagree with my school on how many CLEP's a student can transfer into their program. I could then show them a copy of your schools minimum passing score's for CLEP, whip out a copy of my transcript with my CLEP scores and perhaps even impress them with what your 'traditional' school required as the minimum and what I recieved on my exam.

As for where I'm going. Excelsior (as my sig says), my goals were to

1. Have a degree, any (legit) degree. I'm happy where I am with employment, not having a degre has never held be back, but it could in the future. Perhaps one day that employer just won't look at my resume without checking that degree box.

2. Be in a format I could accomplish without hurting my current work load. This meant online, or very minimal part time traditional, at the very least, exams for some courses has really helped out a ton.

3. Cost. I'm not taking out loans for a degree program, I'm to cheap for that.

4. Get into a graduate program if I want to. This impacted the accrediation of the school I wanted to go with. I've looked into many graduate programs (MS in Management, MS IT, MBA, and so on). I've yet to see any requirements that would exclude a degree from any of the three schools I've mentioned. Normal requirements include. GPA, Regionally Accredited undergrad, specific course pre-req's. Additional requirements for some programs include: letters of recomendation, entrance exam. Not a single program said anything about the learning method if the undergrad degree. Could this bias happen? Sure, but it would have to be at the level of the admissions office, and unless it's a very difficult program to get into that isn't likely.

If you want to tell me where you go I'll look, or you can look. I'm guessing that if your school has graduate programs I'd qualify for some of them with a degree from one of these schools.


Am I missing out on some traditional experiences? Hell ya I am. I don't get to party all the time, I never had professional training in chugging a beer, I never got to call my parents for money, I'm not under a huge debt load (infact no school debt and I'm a few months from being able to write a check to pay off the balance of my mortgage), and my resume doesn't have 4 years of my professional IT experience missing. All at the same time yes I have friends in traditional education (I'm 28), they don't come back to me and say how awsome their teacher was because he researched all this stuff, they complain about the fact that they're in debt, or they have a degre now but don't know what to do for a job, or they talk about their frat and some awsome party they had. There are certainly things you'll get in traditional education that you won't get in a non-traditional format but a big part of it seems to be social, not educational. You can't tell me that in your traditional programs that you don't know students who seem to be slackers most of the semester but cram for tests the night before, that happens everywhere. Are those people more educated than people who study hard for a few weeks and take a CLEP? If they aren't, then what's the harm in taking that CLEP (or other exam) for more than just a few courses.