ladylearner Wrote:So I was on the TESU website taking a look at the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program and noticed that TESU mentions transferring in credits for American Council on Education courses that have been evaluated at the graduate level

Does anyone have experience with courses or exams that have been approved by ACE for graduate credit? I've never seen or heard of that before.

ladylearner Wrote:Does anyone have experience with courses or exams that have been approved by ACE for graduate credit? I've never seen or heard of that before.

johnjaxs Wrote:CDSE has some, although I believe (not 100% sure) you need to be military/DOD.

DSS / CDSE / Education Certificates

Leherself Wrote:Yeah, you have to be military and/or a federal civilian employee for these (not sure if it's restricted to DoD or if it's fed wide). Their stuff is all full blown graduate courses - 12 week online courses with discussion board posts, tests, and research papers. So if you qualify it's nice to have a source of free credits, but they're not easy, fast, or self-paced (DSS also has a number of in-person courses that are ACE evaluated). I also inquired with a handful of graduate programs that claim to be open to transfer credit (Excelsior, TESU, AMU) and the responses I got were pretty uninspiring - mostly elective credit, if anything. I may end up taking one or two of their classes because they count as continuing education for my security certification, but as far as using them as a leg up on grad school I've pretty much completely disgarded the idea at this point as a waste of time. As it is, I withdrew from the one I had signed up for because it was just too time consuming for me to manage at the time.

For the most part graduate studies are too specific and focused for transfer credit to be terribly useful I think. CDSE's stuff probably lends itself best to a Masters in Security Management (AMU offers this). It doesn't even really work for a general business degree because it's all too federal government focused.

ladylearner Wrote:Since I saw the mention of ACE graduate credits being transferable on TESU's MALS page, I thought maybe there were some liberal arts ACE graduate credits somewhere out there.

As far as transferring graduate credits in general, I read somewhere on the forum that Amberton University is pretty flexible in that regard. I noticed Rutgers' MALS degree program also allows a lot of transfer credits. So maybe it is an affordable way to get a master's degree for someone who needs it for work. I could see it as a way to complete a graduate degree with the required 18 graduate credits in a subject area. Certainly something to think about. Most traditional graduate programs that I have seen allow no more than 6 transfer credits.