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Chopping That 120 Credit Hour Goal Down To Manageable Size: Not All Of Your Credits Have To Come From The Classroom

**This content is excerpted from the Guerilla Manual for Adult College Students. To learn more about the book or author visit AdultStudents.com .

"I've volunteered for so many organizations and done so much stuff with my life that I was able to sit down (with my mentor) and justify 48 credits. And I didn't take any CLEP tests. That's all life experience."
Rich B., 44, married with six children, fell off a scaffold and became disabled. He enrolled at his non-traditional, non-residential four year college and earned a Bachelor's Degree in just 2-1/2 years.

There are lots of ways to earn credit!

When the day-school kids go to college, virtually all of them sit through all 40+ classes that it typically takes to get a 4-year degree. They are young, inexperienced, probably have never had a full-time job, and almost certainly are not married and don't have children.

Only some of the college experience for these people is designed to instill knowledge of a particular subject. Much of it is meant to help them grow up and mature, to teach them responsibility, to learn how to work together in groups, and to generally socialize them so that down the road somewhere they can become productive members of society.

While you may not have anyone footing the bill for you to go to school like many of the kids do, you do have a lot of advantages that they do not have. As a fully-functioning, older, experienced, employed adult who has already assumed a lot of responsibilities in his or her life, you have already learned most of the things that the kids have yet to learn. And you did it just by showing up for life.

And guess what? You could very well turn some - perhaps a lot - of this experience into class credits...without ever having to sit through a particular class.

I'll say that again:

You may not have to actually attend a class to get credit for it!

In fact, you might be able to get credit for as many as a dozen or more of your required 40-some classes, just by demonstrating what you already know.

And while you might actually enjoy sitting in the classroom for those classes, taking them is definitely going to slow you down in your quest for that piece of paper. If your goal is to just get that degree and get on with your life, read this section carefully. You might be able to eliminate several years of part-time school!

There are a variety of ways to get college credit, and attending classes in person is only one of them.

CLEP Tests

The College Level Examination Program (CLEP) has been developed by the College Entrance Examination Board. These tests measure general educational knowledge and understanding of basic facts and principles.

CLEP is a national system of credit by examination that is available through nearly every accredited two-year and four-year college. According to the College Board, there are 2,900 colleges that grant credit and/or advanced standing for CLEP exams.

There are at least several dozen of these exams, with subjects ranging from general exams in English, College Math, the Humanities, and Social Sciences and History, to French, German and Spanish, to History, Government, Economics, Psychology and Sociology, to Math and sciences like Calculus, Trig, Algebra, Biology and Chemistry, and various business subjects such as Management, Accounting and Marketing.

For a quick recap of this program, visit the College Board's CLEP site at http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/clep/about.html

Departmental tests

In addition to CLEP, which nearly all accredited schools will accept, many schools offer you the ability to test out of various subjects like English 101, Writing, History, Introductory Math, the beginning Sciences, etc. These programs are created and run within given departments in the school, using their own departmental tests. Exams in more advanced subjects might also be available. Check with your adviser.

Your job

Yes, believe it or not, you may well be able to get college credit simply for being a grown up and holding down a job! This is especially true if your job is in your major field. Once again, check with your adviser.

"I got credit for military experience. (They) filled up my general electives and my physical education. I got a total of 31 credits."
Joyce M., 36 and the single mother of three kids, worked 20 hours a week at her community college and carried a full time class load. She earned her Associate's in June 1998 with a 3.8 GPA. She's on track to earn a Master's.

Military Experience

College-level courses are widely available through all branches of the U.S. Military services. Formerly called the United States Armed Forces Institute (USAFI), the program is now called DANTES, the Defense Activity for Non-Traditional Education Support.

Training that you received while in the military might be transferable to your college. This training might include (but not be limited to) tech schools and leadership courses.

In many schools military service will also substitute for the required physical education courses. If you were in the military - active or reserve - and took any training at all, in anything, it will pay to review those courses with the registration and advisement people at your school. Many colleges also have a Veteran's Affairs person on staff - they will know how to access your military training records and have them evaluated for college credit.

Life Experience: credit by evaluation

Many schools award credits for what they like to call experiential learning, the experiences you have had as an adult. These programs go by various names, including Credit By Evaluation and Portfolio Assessment or Portfolio Development. Whatever your school calls it, I call it showing up for life, because that's what it amounts to. Credit possibilities include work experience, volunteer service, conferences, workshops, in-service training, professional licenses, hobbies, certifications awarded from professional organizations, independent readings, even travel.

There are a lot of other possibilities in this "get credit for living" category. Talk it over with your registration office people or adviser. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Televised classes

If you have a local TV channel, a cable system or a Public Broadcasting System channel in your city, you have the first requirement for a televised course: some way to televise it. Many colleges conduct one or more classes live, on the air, every semester.

How these classes work varies by school, but in general you register for these classes just as you would any other course, buy a book, do papers and homework assignments and mail them to the instructor, who grades them and mails them back to you. At the end of the course you get credit for the class, just as if you were sitting in a classroom.

Another variant has you watching TV every other class, or every third class, with the no TV classes spent on campus in a conventional classroom.

"(This televised course) saves me a lot of time. It (only) meets five times in the classroom. This could be a class that meets twice a week, but I'm only coming in five times. Then on Thursday morning I watch TV. I get a kick out of it because I'm sitting there in my pajamas basically sitting in class. I get up, get a bowl of cereal, sit down and write down all my notes. And I'm all set."
Jason B. commenting on his televised course.

Video classes

This is another possibility you'll want to investigate. Many schools have taped an entire semester of a particular class, and those tapes are in the school library. Ask your librarian if your school has any of these. Then ask the heads of the departments that taped the classes if a particular course is available for credit by viewing the videotapes and doing the class assignments.

These classes are sometimes listed in the schedule, but in many cases you are going to have to do some digging to find them.

Correspondence classes

Some classes are already structured as correspondence classes, with syllabus, book requirements, homework assignments, tests and everything else you need all assembled in a single box or envelope. Once again, these classes may not show up in the course schedule. Ask some questions of various department heads, or check with your adviser.

Independent study

Many schools will allow you to custom-construct a class for credit in a particular subject area. You usually work with a teacher, the class involves a significant amount of outside reading or studying, and you normally have to turn in a final project - a research paper, a musical composition, a film, a short story, a piece of art, etc. The schedule is usually mutually agreed upon between you and the person who supervises it, and could run from a few weeks to an entire semester or longer.

You may already be working on some project as a part of your job or hobby that might qualify for an independent study course. Since you already have a very good handle on the subject matter, you might be able to crash through the necessary independent study requirements in just a few weeks - a much better way to earn credit than sitting through four months of classes!

Internet classes and other forms of distance learning

The Internet is one of the most vibrant learning arenas available. Literally thousands of courses are available from many hundreds of colleges. And that probably includes the one you're thinking of attending. On-line courses on the World Wide Web offer the ultimate in flexibility: you show up in front of your computer whenever you like, do the work, transmit it electronically to the professor and wait for a response.

Where do you find Internet classes? Not surprisingly, one of the best places to start your search is on the Internet itself. Keywords like Distance Education, Distance Learning, Online Learning or Lifelong Learning entered into one of the major search engines will return literally thousands of possible sites.

The non-traditional college

In 1971, the State University of New York launched Empire State College, its "college without a campus." This non-traditional, non-residential college was based on the idea that students would work one-on-one with a mentor, someone who would guide them through a given course of independent study. A series of these studies, called contracts, would, taken together, constitute a degree: an Associate's, a Bachelor's or a Master's degree.

Empire State College was among the first schools to attempt this innovative delivery method. Most of the rest of them have since failed. But Empire State has clearly become the most successful of its kind by far. It was the first public, non-traditional college in the United States to be accredited by the Middle States Association, the same organization that accredits the State University of New York system. At any given moment Empire State has something in excess of 10,000 students, and can boast tens of thousands of graduates in its thirty year history.

Note that courses pursued in a non-traditional setting tend to be very heavy in reading and writing. Since there is no classroom attendance, and normally no tests, the professor has no day-to-day gauge of how well a student is doing. The student has to demonstrate a thorough understanding of the material, and this is usually done through papers.

"I picked (my non-traditional college) for the flexibility of not sitting in the classroom for several hours a week. Even if money were no object, I'd pick the same type of program again."
Andrea W., 47, employed full time and the single mother of one child, started at a community college in 1967 and finally finished her Bachelor's Degree in the year 2000.

Most day school students don't have a clue that these sorts of credit possibilities even exist. That's no surprise, since most day school students have not really had much in the way of life experiences - they have just not been around all that long. So many schools mention these alternate credit-earning possibilities only briefly somewhere in their catalog.

You will probably have to do a little digging to find out what options are available at your school. Start with the registration/admissions office. Talk to your advisers. You might want to check in with the heads of the various departments in your school.

But all that research will probably be worth it. You may be very surprised at the wide variety of options available, and at how much credit you can actually amass through these non-classroom modes of learning.

"The first thing they ask is, can I do it? The self-confidence issue. I've been out of school for 20 years. They don't realize that although they've been dormant in a sense, boy!, their minds are sharp! They're focussed, they're goal-oriented, they're motivated. And once they get past the idea that they can't do it, and they find out they can do it - watch out! All you can see is their smoke!"
Bill Sigismond is the Director of Experiential and Adult Learning at Monroe Community College in Rochester, NY.

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