College Level Examination Program Advantages

As learners look for ways to make education more affordable, there is an obvious chance that learners and their parents seem unacquainted with, the College Level Examination Program, or CLEP assessments. These assessments allow learners to be able to test out of up to 33 college level programs. That can convert to up to 45 units.  Many of these programs such as chemistry, calculus, geometry, history and humanities, are required by almost all colleges and universities and some trade schools. These are programs that college-bound learners should already be taking in high school. Students who are doing well in these topics in secondary school should be able to successfully pass these programs, with little or no training, if they just study hard while in high school, but training and practice assessments are available.

clepThe price of a unit of study at Northern State University is $133 per unit for citizens, so a three-unit class would cost about $400, not keeping track of the guides and various other fees. The CLEP examination costs $80.  The big advantages come when you take enough CLEP examinations to equal a term or more of college tuition. For each term of classes you could miss at NSU, you would save their approximately $12,363, if you live at home, or the more likely $18,821 if you live on campus. Because NSU is one of the more cost-friendly colleges, you would save even more if you choose more expensive universities. As they say on the College Level Examination Program website, “you do the math.”

Within a 200-mile distance of Aberdeen, the site identifies 32 organizations that agree to CLEP examinations. Regionally, they include NSU and Presentation College. South Dakota State University, University of Sioux Falls, Dakota State University and Augustana also agree to these assessments. Even Lake Area Tech allows them. If you are looking outside the state, more than 2,900 universities and colleges accept these examinations.  Another real benefit comes in time. Every term, the college student can “CLEP out of” is a term they could be making profits and getting real-life experience. Real education happens when you interact with what you have learned in the class room with actual life problems.

Pursuing Accreditation Through NLNAC

When seeking accreditation or re-accreditation, there are many ways to handle the procedure. Because of the complexity of the accreditation procedure, it is crucial to consider how we may apply technological innovation to help handle the procedure. Whether it is interaction with stakeholders, handling amount of work for staff, or offering large amounts of information to the targeted traffic, there are 100 % free and easy-to-use resources that can make the procedure not only more controllable, but also improve the opportunities of a better result.

nlnac_accreditationUsing a distributed data file service (e.g. Dropbox or Google Drive) can really help staff with handling several editions being used by several authors. Using an online survey tool often allows gathering data that is more controllable for members and researchers. Often times, these resources are also 100 % free. Having learners submit artifacts to an on the internet task selection tool in the learning management system will help create one location where examples can be saved. Having a USB drive ready for the targeted traffic allows with handling a number of different data file types, sizes and locations. Also, consider simple video clips as a means of describing and indicating how your system controls day-to-day functions. These video clips can also emphasize important features of your system such as simulator and group outreach.

Using technological innovation does not have to be complex and it can really improve the accreditation experience for all engaged. Whether it is NLNAC, CCNE, or Board of Nursing, you can apply resources at low price or no price to make your system glow. All baccalaureate, graduate, and residency nursing programs working under CCNE certification do so according to nationally recognized requirements. Nursing certificate, diploma, and professional degree programs working under NLNAC accreditation do so depending on the same requirements as well. And contribution in both is completely voluntary.

Anatomy & Physiology Tips for Getting a Good Grade

The first thing to do is to focus upon the terms that explain orientation and direction in space of areas of one’s individual body. Be particularly careful not to mix up left and right. Our use of computers has taught us some habits. We left and right justify material on the screen without thinking much about it, the reference always being our own left and right side. However, in anatomy and physiology, you need to always think with regards to the specimen’s left and right side.

Pay attention to the correct pronunciation of physiological terms. Most brain components dedicated to processing of auditory signals are superb at critical pitch of the individual speech and giving meaning to it. If English is not your primary language and you are taking an anatomy and physiology course with an English speaking instructor, Google has a great free website to help you. There, you can enter the scientific term from your anatomy and physiology book and then have it converted into virtually any language in the world. Under each term is a mic symbol that you can click to hear the phrase in both languages. Practice saying the terms and pay attention to your own speech.

Break lengthy anatomic names into small areas to extract meaning. Researchers love to make up lengthy terms from a combination of small terms. Originally, shorter terms used in anatomy and physiology were Roman Latin and Greek terms. Early anatomists established the concept of using the meaning of the Latin and Greek terms to explain newly observed areas of one’s individual body.

Work at understanding what is meant by homeostasis. Briefly, every aspect of anatomy is directed toward the body maintenance of an optimal set of working circumstances, set temperature, neutral blood pH, precise body fluid composition and so forth. Physiologists call this process of keeping individual body conditions in the correct range maintaining homeostasis. Maintaining homeostasis requires a network of Receptors that signal when a property of the system wanders out of the preferred range. Receptors or sensors send alerts to Responders. Responders bring the system back to the preferred condition. Individual sets of Receptors and Responders are called Feedback Loops.

Advanced Placement Courses Population Falls

The number of Sioux Falls learners getting advanced placement courses decreased almost 8% last school year over the year before, partially because of an overall decrease in secondary school registration, authorities said. Slightly more than 2,000 learners registered in advanced placement courses in the Sioux Falls School District last school year, down about 170 learners from the year before. The figures were provided to the Sioux Falls School Board. Officials said the figures drop in range with the pattern the district has been seeing over the years and are not a big issue. “The comfort is, this year’s performance decreased in range with the long run,” Superintendent Pam Homan said. Board member Todd Thoelke said he would like to see more children using the programs.

“It’s a great program and I know the dedication from learners is remarkable. It gives them a glance inside the world of higher education,” he said. “It also gives them a step up for when that day comes.” Students are provided a wide range of different advanced placement courses, with the program determined by the company College Board, covering composition, history, geography, chemistry and Spanish, among others. Some classes are provided during the school day in a class room, but others are provided online, which can help learners who cannot fit a particular class into their schedule.

At the end of the course, learners have the choice to take an AP examination. Test results are reported on a range of 1-5 and learners must accomplish a grade of 3 or greater in order for the course to be regarded for college credit. Last school year, 70% of Sioux Falls learners who took an AP examination passed. The national passing rate is 61%. There is benefit both for learners to take the examination and educational institutions to motivate their learners to do so, said Laura Raeder, high school curriculum coordinator for the school district. Students can take the AP examination at a price of $87, generally less than the price of a college credit. The district subsidizes the price for learners who have financial need but are not eligible for support through other means.

Nursing Homes Quality

Ohio tax payers are paying large numbers to nursing homes that don’t succeed to fulfill minimum state specifications for looking after their citizens, falling short of a bar many say is too low. Even three nursing homes on a government watch list for high numbers of inadequacies over long periods, two in Cincinnati and one in Youngstown, met Ohio’s quality measures, which give a passing quality even if a service flunks 75% of state specifications. In all, $12.7 million was invested to take good care of sufferers living in nursing homes that did not achieve at least five of 20 measures for great quality care, according to research for the financial year that ended June 30 from the Ohio Department of Medicaid. Still, less than 1% fell short of that standard, only nine of the 926 nursing homes. One has since closed. None is in central Ohio.

“We’ve got some good signs, but the floor is so low everybody can fulfill those,” said Robert Applebaum, home of the Ohio Long-term Care Research Project at Miami University. He also served on the advisory board that released suggestions to congress for enhancing care. “We need to do a better job of getting rid of bad-quality homes, but we also need to do a better job of reimbursing the high-quality homes.”

Medicaid, which provides coverage of health to poor and impaired Ohioans, will pay for approximately 70% of nursing-home care in the state. On average, the federal-state program includes about 58,200 long-term-care citizens. Last year, in an effort to improve institutional care, the state started demanding features to fulfill at least five of 20 high quality measures to earn a full State Medicaid programs payment, which earnings $165 a day per person. The measures include giving citizens meal options, enabling them to choose when they get up and go to bed and the opportunity to customize their bedrooms. The nine nursing homes unable to fulfill the mark lost 10% of the payment, or nearly $16.50 of the per-resident daily subsidy. Those funds are to be allocated to the more than 900 facilities meeting the standard.

The Credit by Examination Approach

Too many students are targeted on the classes they need to take – English, Psychology, Chemistry and Accounting. 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. Successfully pass them all and you graduate with the degree you desired. Yet, this is actually a superficial way to look at higher education. As it turns out, classes are not the real foundations of degrees – 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’s. This is a key understanding, because once you move your focus from classes to credits, you can begin studying 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.

In reality, there are three methods to generate higher education credit:

  • Classes at four year colleges/private universities
  • Classes at community colleges
  • Credit by examination

Most students are acquainted with the first two choices. But hardly anyone knows about credit by examination and even less understand its complete prospective.

Credit by examination represents college-level topic assessments like CLEP and DSST. With this strategy, you take a large test covering a whole topic rather than a semester-long course. Successfully pass the examination and you generate credit just as if you had taken the class. What this implies is that you can possibly cut lots of money off the price of finishing by replacing as many of these examinations for classes as your higher education will allow. Unfortunately, many colleges and universities have tight “residency requirements” restricting how many credits you can get this way.

Strategies For Patient-Centered Care

Nearly 200 medical professionals from around the state gathered in Manchester to share their communities’ techniques to providing Vermonters with high-quality, patient-centered medical care. “With all the state and federal policy changes ongoing, medical service suppliers remain targeted on why we are so deeply engaged in this work, to create lasting improvements in patient care and community wellness,” says Bea Grause, President and CEO of the Vermont Association of Hospitals and Health Systems (VAHHS).

The conference provided an opportunity for members to understand about colleagues’ experiences with new techniques to clinical care, finance and governance issues. The meeting’s centerpiece was a “town hall” session in which members shared ideas and strategies medical service suppliers are employing to ensure Vermonters receive high-quality medical care. The session also targeted on giving sufferers and families a voice in their care. “Patients want authentic engagement in care choices,” says Ben Chu, Board Chair of the American Hospital Association. “It’s exciting to understand about the efforts ongoing in Vermont that will interact with sufferers in a way that educates them about their options and respects their needs and values.”

The VAHHS Annual Meeting took place during a time of rapid and significant changes. Medical centers and other suppliers around the state are developing OneCare Vermont, a provider network established to eliminate unnecessary care, use resources wisely and interact with sufferers in their wellness and fitness. In October, many individuals and small companies will begin purchasing health insurance coverage through Vermont Health Connect, the state’s new online health insurance coverage market. The state is also beginning work on a federally-funded State Innovation Model (SIM) project to test new patient care delivery and payment models. “Vermont continues to lead on medical care reform,” says Raymond Hurd, Regional Administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). “We are excited that Vermont is using an innovation model as another way to improve high quality of patient care and individual experience while lowering the cost of medical care for its citizens.”

DANTES Exams and Civilians

A way of prior learning evaluation, DANTES offer learners an affordable, time preserving way to use their information obtained outside of the class room (perhaps from studying, on-the-job training, or separate study) to achieve their academic objectives. If you are like me, you look for methods to reduce costs while attending higher education. Although most of us know to shop for used books and test out of programs with CLEP examinations, those of us with no army qualifications may have little, if any, information of DANTES exam or otherwise known as DSST examinations. Until lately, DANTES exam (now known as DSST exam) was only for army employees. Fortunate for us citizens, now we get to take advantage of these examinations too! Why is this a good thing? More options, of course!

Here’s a list of DANTES Exam subjects:

  • Fundamentals of College Algebra
  • Principles of Statistics
  • Art of the Western World
  • Western Europe Since 1945
  • Introduction to the Modern Middle East
  • Human/Cultural Geography
  • Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union
  • A History of the Vietnam War
  • The Civil War and Reconstruction
  • Foundations of Education
  • Lifespan Developmental Psychology
  • General Anthropology
  • Drug and Alcohol Abuse
  • Introduction to Law Enforcement
  • Criminal Justice
  • Fundamentals of Counseling
  • Principles of Finance
  • Principles of Financial Accounting
  • Human Resource Management
  • Organizational Behavior
  • Principles of Supervision
  • Business Law II
  • Introduction to Computing
  • Introduction to Business
  • Money and Banking
  • Personal Finance
  • Management Information Systems
  • Business Mathematics
  • Astronomy
  • Here’s to Your Health
  • Environment and Humanity: The Race to Save the Planet
  • Principles of Physical Science I
  • Physical Geology
  • Technical Writing
  • Ethics in America
  • Introduction to World Religions
  • Principles of Public Speaking

Hospital Infections and Their Cost

Infections obtained in the hospital cost the U.S. medical care system $10 billion dollars a year, new results display. Past analysis have placed the yearly price of dealing with those infections at $20 billion dollars to $40 billion dollars, so the new figures show improvement is being made, Dr. Eyal Zimlichman of The Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, one of the new study’s writers, informed Reuters Health. Nevertheless, he said, much more can be done.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or CDC, about one in every 20 put in the hospital contract a hospital-acquired disease. Zimlichman and his group analyzed 26 studies to recognize the expenses associated with dealing with the five most typical, expensive and avoidable infections among hospitalized patients. Bloodstream infections from central lines, which are long pipes placed in a large vein such as in the stomach area or arm to provide drugs, liquids, nutrients or blood products, were the most expensive, at a price of $45,814 per case. Ventilator-associated pneumonia, or a bronchi ailment that produces while a person is on a respirator, came in second, at $40,144 per case.

Post-surgery infections happening at the site of the operation cost $20,785 per patient. Infection with Clostridium difficile, a tough-to-treat bacteria that causes serious diarrhea and can spread within hospital units, cost $11,285 per case. UTIs were the least expensive, at $896 per case. About 441,000 of these infections happen among hospitalized adults in the U.S. every year, for a sum total of $9.8 billion dollars, Zimlichman and his co-workers revealed in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Post surgery infections and ventilator-associated pneumonia each included about one third of the total expenses. That was followed by central line bloodstream infections (about 19 percent), C. difficile infections (15 percent) and UTIs, which included less than 1 % of all expenses. Up to 70 % of central line infections and ventilator-associated pneumonias can be avoided if the medical care group dealing with the individual follows a guideline of best practices included Pronovost, who did not take part in the new analysis. Patients can secure themselves by asking a hospital about their infection rates and what they are doing to decrease them, he said.

Sociology of Imperialism – BLOG REJECTED DUE TO UNACCEPTABLE TOPIC

President Barack Obama said that he has made the decision to use military power against Syria and would seek for permission from Congress when it came back from its August break. Every Member ought to vote against this careless and wrong use of the US army. But, even if every individual Member and Senator votes for another war, it will not make this dreadful concept any better, because some kind of nod is given to the Constitution along the way.

 

Besides, Obama made it obvious that Congressional permission is unnecessary, saying incorrectly that he has the power to act on his own with or without the legislature. That the legislature allows itself to be handled as window dressing by the imperial president is just unbelievable. According to latest press reviews, the army does not have enough cash to strike Syria and would have to go to the legislature for an extra appropriation to bring out the attacks. It seems our kingdom is at the end of its economical string. The restricted attacks that Obama has asked for in Syria would cost the US in the millions of dollars of cash. Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Martin Dempsey had written to the Congress that just the training of Syrian rebels and “limited” rocket and air attacks would cost “in the billions” of dollars. We should clearly know what another war will do to the U.S. economic system, in addition to the consequences of extra unidentified expenses such as a raise in energy expenses as oil increases exponentially.

In “The Sociology of Imperialism,” Joseph Schumpeter had written of the Roman Empire’s reckless interventionism: “There was no area of the known globe where some interest was not claimed to be in risk or under real strike. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome’s allies; and if the capital had no allies, then allies would be developed. When it was absolutely difficult to contrive an interest, why, then it was the nationwide honor that had been insulted.” The Sociology of Imperialism is almost chillingly familiar with the current state of the country.