I am looking for a DL school that I can receive a BA in NAtural Sciences/Mathmatics..........but will take more than 80 credit hours from a Community Collge. I have like 130 Credit hours from a Comm Collge and have like 25 from a University. I applied to TESC and they will only take 80 comm college level. Can anyone help me out. I don't mind making up a few courses, but 15 courses is a bit much, and they are in English, 200-400 level and Free Electives. They didn't take a lot of English courses (over the Comm College limit), and didn't take a lot of other 200 level courses and electives for the same reason! Please advise. Thanks JB
The problem with community college courses is that they are considered to be lower division, freshman and sophomore level courses. Any US RA degree program will require you to have about 30-40 credits at the upper division level, hence the maximum amount that Thomas Edison has imposed on you. I don't think you will find too many schools that will let you exceed 80 hours - but hopefully someone will chime in with a suggestion. If you're just missing some free electives, have you considered 'testing out' the credits you need through DANTES or TECEP or Excelsior College exams? There's a decent selection of tests in a variety of subjects that will get you upper division credit. The GRE in literature is another option, also.
You see my problem is, that 60% of the courses I have from the Comm College are upper level courses, high level Math, Physics, Geog, Eng, Hum...the rest were GE classes. The rest of the University were upper level anyways. TESC wouldn't take a lot of my upper level because they were from a Comm College......because it was over their "cap" of courses that is allowed from a CC. TO me, it seems like a waste to take so many extra 200-400 level courses and so many free electives.... I am NOT looking for a free degree or anything.......but my god, 15 courses is a bit much. It will take me 2-3 years to do all that. And I spent 5 years in college before hand then.
See if they'll exclude the general ed courses rather than the more advanced courses to bring you "under" the cap. The general ed courses can be easily dispatched via testing... and credit received via testing isn't treated as "community college" credit, no matter the level. Pain, but a lesser pain. My advisor at TESC was always willing to accomodate "outside the box" requests. Good luck.
I'm curious how you could get upper level credit from a community college. I was under the impression that community colleges (or any other 2-year schools) only offer freshman and sophomore level courses. Maybe this was a mistaken impression, but it would seem very strange to me if one of these schools were to offer junior or senior level courses without a corresponding credential. If the school does offer an upper-level credential, then you should have a good argument for having it reclassified, in which case credits from that source shouldn't be included in the 80 credit limit. Why would you need to take 15 courses, in any case? Or was that a typo? It seems that even if you only apply 80 credits from your 2-year schools, and then add your other 25 credits, then you're only lacking 15 credits (probably 5 courses, or 1 to 5 exams), not 15 courses. Depending upon which specific degree requirements you still need to fulfill, you could possibly do this via exam and spend less than a week on it (maybe even just one day).
The upper level courses that come from my community college were in Mathematics, like Partial & Differencial Eq, Probability, Linear Algebra. And in Geography.
Charter Oak Have you looked into Charter Oak State College? I was looking at their requirements ( http://www.cosc.edu/enrolled/deg_requirements.htm , http://www.cosc.edu/forms/studenthandbook.pdf ); and it seems the only required upper-level credits have to do with whatever concentration you choose, and it doesn't seem anywhere near the "30-40 credits" that AlexN mentions for any of the concentrations. But perhaps I'm missing something.
COSC requires 15 credits of upper division credit that will be included in your concentration. They also require 12 credits of 200 level work and 9 credits of 100 level for the concentration. I have found COSC to be very easy to work with.
Every school is different, but I've seen all of these courses offered with sophomore level designations, so I'm still not sure why they would be considered upper level... Regardless, you probably would only need to take a few exams in order to finish up a degree, depending upon the distribution of credits you've already earned and how well they match up with degree requirements. Your best bet for getting good advice is probably to post a list of the courses you've taken (including schools and course numbers). Someone might be willing to use that information to point you toward a program that is a good fit.
Excelsior College NobyCane writes: > Can anyone give me their opinions about Excelsior College > as a whole and in general? Well, don't expect them to be reasonable. Even John Bear has said, "The VP at Excelsior who listened to reason, Dr. Paula Peinovich, has moved on to Walden." When my wife Rosie had Excelsior do a Credit Review, we found multiple ways in which it's harder to get a degree from Excelsior than Bears' Guide suggests it is (Excelsior does not entertain appeals of ECE's foreign credential evaluations; there is no proven way to get more than 16 credits for fluency in a foreign language; the National Guard Sergeant's 3-GRE feat would be virtually impossible to repeat today) . Nor can we blame it all on the Bears: Dr Bear tells me that Excelsior approved relevant text last year. At the time Rosie applied, Excelior's Web page on portfolios included four options, two of which turned out to be not available. Excelsior has corrected the Web page at my insistence, but the incorrect info is reflected in Bears' Guide. Excelsior takes 6 to 8 weeks to do a Credit Review; and though they say they evaluate transcripts "based on the course description", we saw no evidence that they looked at anything other than the course title (which is woefully abbreviated on some transcripts). Rosie decided not to enroll. Still, Excelsior will doubtless be the best choice for some people.
