CLEPing through English BA at TESC

[ness2991]

Hello, everyone! Thank you for looking!

My name is William, and I am trying to figure out how to go about starting my college education. I'm planning on being a high school teacher in a conference of Christian schools, and in my situation all I need to have is an English BA to get my foot in the door and start teaching. I have experience with working with youth (I was an assistant dean and student teacher at an academy for a year) and my resume would be attractive to ministerial teaching if I could just get the education I need for it.

I've done a lot of comparing, and I think TESC would be the best for fit me. I'd like to complete the BA online, and I plan on CLEPing over half of the coursework. I talked to an adviser from CollegePlus, and he told me that I could potentially take about 26 CLEPs and only have to attend about 6 classes or so. This is exciting news! Alas, the services they offered weren't quite what I needed for the price they were asking. I just needed help with charting my course.

Specifically, where I need assistance is where to start with the CLEPs. Unless I talk to an academic adviser (which means enrolling at TESC, costing me over a thousand dollars that I really don't need to spend right now), I only know of a handful of CLEPS that would be guaranteed to match up with the program. I don't want to enroll until I'm ready to get slammin' on the classes, and I'd like to have the majority of my CLEPs taken care of at that point. I could really use a way to know which tests will fill which requirements for this class.

TL;DR - I'm a guy wanting to get a BA in English, I want to CLEP as much as I can and finish at TESC. Where do I start?

Here are the CLEPs they accept at TESC:
CLEP - College-Level Exam Program

Here's what I need to complete my English BA:
Thomas Edison State College: English

Any help that you could give would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time and care!

- William

P.S. I did go through quite a few threads looking for similar questions, but I couldn't find anything that could answer my specific questions. I apologize for any redundancies!

[Lindagerr]

Do you have any college credits yet?

Be sure to check this out for great advice and sample degree plans Degree Forum Wiki

I was/am a teacher/substitute and my recommendation would be take as many education type classes as you can to prepare you. You can probably use them in electives.

You do not need to enroll at TESC right now, but remember they change some requirements every July 1st so you want to be enrolled before July 1, 2016 so requirements don't change on you.

[happydayruth]

Hi ness2991,

I'm currently about 24 credits away from finishing my BA in English through TESC. I'm happy to share my experiences with you! Please note that I applied to TESC under the old catalog, and from what I understand, some requirements may have changed. I chose to take a few more classes than strictly necessary, because I wanted to. I *could* have taken more CBEs to fulfil all of my free electives, but there were a few classes that I really wanted to take, so I did/am.

I took around 20 CLEP/DSST/TECEP exams and used ALEKs to fulfil my math requirements. There are a lot of resources and informed people on this forum that can direct you to the best ways to fulfill all of your general education requirements. There are a lot of options available to you; you should be able to test out of all of your gen ed requirements. Keep reading or ask on the forums for more info.

For the Area of Study,
American Literature CLEP fulfills 6 credits under "Survey of Literature"
Analyzing and Interpreting Literature CLEP fulfills 3 credits under "Analysis and Interpretation"
English Literature CLEP fulfills 6 credits of English Electives


I have taken several classes from American Public University including:
Russian Literature (fulfills the non-western literature requirement)
Shakespeare
Introduction to Linguistics (I put this in free electives)

I'm taking two classes from TESC:
Jane Austen: One Writer's Vision
Liberal Arts Capstone

One class from BYU:
ENGL395R - Studies in Literature

One class from SNHU:
ENG350 - The English Language

I hope this is helpful to you, please let me know if you have any questions.

[ness2991]

Wow, great information! Thank you. Very helpful, and I should really look into the DSSTs. I thought they were only for Military personnel, but apparently they're for everyone! That opens a lot of test taking opportunities.

As for the wiki, I really should take some time and "study" that.

Thanks!