Too many learners are focused on the classes they need to take. English, Psychology, Chemistry, Accounting are just some of the common subjects. It’s simple to see why. Pick up a college course book and you will see that degree programs are set out as series of classes to take. Complete them all and you graduate with the degree you desired. Yet this is actually a superficial way to look at college. As it turns out, classes are not the real foundations of degree, credits are. Take a closer look at your college’s course book. What you will see is that you actually need a certain number of credits to graduate, usually 60 for an associate degree and 120 for a bachelor degree. This is a key understanding, because once you move your focus from classes to credit, you can begin analyzing methods to buy them for less.
The costly classes your university provides are just one way of getting those credits, even though most learners thoughtlessly believe it’s the only way. Actually, there are three methods to generate college credit: classes at four year community colleges/private universities, classes at local colleges and credit by exam. Most learners are acquainted with the first two choices. But hardly anyone knows about credit by exam and even less understand its complete potential.
Credit by exam represents college-level topic assessments like CLEP and DSST. With this strategy, you take a large test covering a whole topic (say, English) rather than a semester-long course. Complete the examination, and you get credit just as if you had taken the class. What this means is that you can possibly cut lots of money off the cost of graduating by replacing as many of these examinations for classes as your college will allow. Unfortunately, many institutions have tight “residency requirements” restricting how many credit score you can get this way. Yet, I’ve found a few institutions that have no residence specifications.