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How To Finish A Legitimate Accelerated Bachelors Degree

We’ve all seen them, the spam emails that promise a “degree” with no courses, no books, no tests. And we’ve all heard stories about the diploma mills that charge a small fee to review your work and life experience, after which they grant you a degree.

This is not about those kinds of degrees.

Needless to say, those kinds of degrees always come back to bite. List one on a resume and watch your reputation tumble like a ton of bricks when everybody figures out it’s fake.

This is about ways that you can accelerate your progress toward a real degree, one that’s on the up and up. This is about working smart toward a fully accredited credential.

How Much Can You Accelerate?
What is a “4 year degree,” anyway? Who decides it has to take 4 years?

State colleges and universities? Higher education’s grande poohbahs? Tradition? History?

You do.

“4 year degree” is just a cliché, just a figure of speech. Just because a college sets the time frame, it does have to bind you. Just because a school claims a Bachelors degree is a “4 year degree” does not mean you have to take four years.

You can accelerate. We have reports of some students who have accumulated 40 college credits in only 2 months. That’s one third of a 120 credit Bachelors degree in two months.

Legitimately. Without cheating.

Realistically, that kind of effort takes focus and study. Not a lot of people are able to devote the effort it takes to complete 40 credit hours in 2 months. However, it can be done and some people are doing it.

How? There are many legitimate methods for reducing the time for completing a degree.

For example, just adding summer courses to your standard semester schedule makes it possible to accelerate by a year, without taking overloads or finding alternative methods for amassing credit.

Think about that. We’ve made just a simple schedule shift (adding summer courses) and already reduced the time you’ll invest in a degree by a year.

We haven’t even started talking about testing, transfers, or other methods for amassing credit.

Requirements for Accelerating
To earn an accelerated degree, you may have to put aside conventional thinking. Most likely, you’ll have to be a bit unconventional. You need to be a bit of a free thinker. It won’t hurt anything if you’re a bit of a rebel.

If following the crowd is your style, it will probably take you four years (at least) to complete a “4 year degree.”

Also, in order to earn an accelerated degree, you need to be able to learn fast. That may seem like a “no-brainer,” but it’s a crucial thing to bear in mind. You see, learning and “earning a degree” are sometimes two different things. If you’re already in college, you already know that.

Finally, to earn an accelerated degree, you will need some tools. You will need some reference materials and some preparation guides. They are the required assets for accelerating your degree.

Note: The methods discussed below are best applied to pursuing a Bachelors degree. There are some ways to accelerate graduate school, but not as readily.

Methods for Accelerating
Earning an accelerated degree is as much about your attitude as anything. To accelerate, you must develop the attitude of an intrepid explorer, always seeking new and better ways to amass credit toward your degree.

Choose Your School Carefully
The first rule for completing an accelerated degree is to be careful about the school you choose. Your school’s attitude and policies will either help or hinder your time to completing your degree.

As you evaluate schools and visit with their representatives, be very upfront about your plan to accelerate. If they seem at all inflexible or reluctant to commit to your plan, find another school.

You will need to focus on your school’s schedule, load limits, transfer requirements, credit waiver and exam policies, and any cooperative or dual enrollment agreements they may have in place.

Let’s take those one at a time:

·         Schedule – Mainly applies to the semester starting and ending dates, especially for summer term. It may also involve learning whether your school has a semester or a quarter (sometimes called tri-mester) system. Many schools have begun to offer “self-paced” programs, by which you determine your own time schedule.

·         Load Limits – Some schools limit the amount of credit you can carry at any given time.

·         Transfer Requirements – Transfer credit is very handy for accelerating your degree. You will need to learn your school’s transfer policies inside and out. Fortunately, this is really easy: Just pick up a copy of the school’s catalog. It’s right in there. And once you have studied the transfer policies (shouldn’t be more than a page or two, max), make an appointment with someone in the Registrar’s Office to discuss any questions.

·         Credit Waiver – Some schools will grant waivers based on your work or external learning experiences. This is related to the “credit for prior experience” process and is becoming quite common among progressive schools.

·         Exam Policies – Credit by exam, usually CLEP or DANTES examinations, can be a key to accelerating your degree program. Be sure you are familiar with your school’s policies for evaluating and accepting credit by exam. Each school has its own policy. Learn yours.

·         Cooperative or Dual Enrollment Agreements – Colleges and universities often make collaborative arrangements with community colleges or other providers. Often, these are quite structured; however, they define pre-set transfer agreements between the two schools. You might find that you can take courses at the community college (perhaps even online) and have them automatically transfer to your degree-granting school.

Maximize Transfers
Transfer credit is an awesome asset for degree acceleration. If you have attended college in the past, your transfer credit should still be viable. Even if your college experience is over 10 years old, you can try to get your school to accept your transfer credit. Ask about it at the Registrar’s office.

In some cases, your transfer credit may be in a field unrelated to your current interest or degree program. In that case, try to get your school to accept the transfer hours as elective credit.

The general principle is to avoid taking anything that you have already taken from another college, even if it was a while ago. After all, English I hasn’t changed recently, right?

Work and Life Experience Portfolio
If your school offers credit for work and life experience, do it. Credit for work and life experience is a very legitimate way to accumulate hours toward your degree and is usually worth the time and effort involved.

Be sure to follow your school’s procedures very closely when completing your work and life experience exercise. Most schools will require a portfolio with documentation, with specific processes and requirements unique to them.

CLEP and DANTES Testing
The College Level Examination Program (CLEP) tests are also great ways to earn credit. The CLEP exams assess your knowledge in areas related to college study. DANTES is a similar program administered by Promtric. Both offer great opportunities to earn credit by exam.

Basically, to earn credit by exam, you take tests to determine if your knowledge is the equivalent to what you would accomplish in a college course. If it is, you get credit.

Most schools are very willing to accept CLEP results for credit. Like every strategy, though, be sure to check with your school before you take a CLEP test.

Also, you can now buy prep guides for the CLEP tests. Especially if it has been a while since you have been to college, the prep guides are great investments.

Correspondence and Independent/Directed Study
Many schools offer two approaches to taking their courses: defined terms and independent study (which some may call “correspondence” study or “directed” study.)

With independent study, you are in charge of the pace of the course. The school normally sets a limit on the length of the course, but leaves you in charge of when the actual work gets done.

So, for example, your school may offer an independent study version of your course, with the requirement that it be finished within 90 days. That does not mean you have to wait 90 days to turn in the materials. You can finish early, and get started on another course.

If your chosen school is inflexible about independent study, or doesn’t offer it for courses you need, you can also take the courses from other schools. Many of the biggest schools in the US, the land grant state universities, offer independent and correspondence courses. And many of those courses are now supported by Web sites, making them de facto online courses.

You can take your courses from these large schools, then transfer the credit back to your school. Be sure to check into your school’s transfer requirements and flexibility before you start trying this. Some schools are distinctly more flexible than others.

Accelerating Graduate Study
Most of these strategies are designed for use at the Bachelors level. Need to accelerate a Masters degree? Your options are more limited, but it can be done.

Accelerating at the graduate level is all about networking and academic politics. The better you are at working the system, the more likely that you can accelerate.

Of the options outlined above, directed study courses are probably the best way to move more quickly through a graduate degree program. They offer you the opportunity to work directly with a faculty member, design the course and its requirements, and move as quickly as possible to get it finished.

In graduate schools, directed study courses are usually within the faculty’s purview. In other words, whether or not you are able to take one will tend to depend upon whether or not you can get a faculty member to support you.

Generally, you need a faculty member’s permission to take the directed study course, and you need for her or him to agree to facilitate it for you. The good news is, once you have the faculty member’s support, almost no one else in a graduate school will interfere.

To get the faculty member’s support, you must have a relationship. This does not mean you should schmooze with faculty members. It does mean that you should establish yourself as a bright, diligent competent student who does great work, lives up to their word, and handles challenge well.

In other words, to accelerate in a graduate program, you have to be able and willing to make a faculty member look good. Your performance will reflect directly on them. The better you perform, the better they look. The better they look, the more willing they are to help you.

This is a very individualized issue, of course, and will shift from school to school and department to department. But follow these guidelines and you will give yourself the best chance to earn an accelerated graduate degree.

* CLEP & DSST are registered trademarks of the College Board and Prometric, which were not involved in the production of, and do not endorse, this information.