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.