Quality of Education Through Testing

[dark_dan]

Well they certainly are different beasts.

Face-to-face classes are nice. There's the great social interaction. You can learn a lot from a professor too. Now that I'm all done with regular classes I know I'm going to miss them.

Distance education you have to rely on yourself and a book. It's a high reading load. At Peru with 8 week classes, you're doing 2 to 3 chapters a week per class. If you've got 3 classes at once, that's several hundred pages of reading.

I do like CLEPs though. I'm waiting for my academic progress sheet to see how many more things I can test out of it before I use up the 66 credit limit at Peru. Testing for credits is flexible though. The only deadlines are the ones you set for yourself. They're cheap!

Why I choose Peru instead of just completely testing out of a degree is based on application and critical thought. There's no doubt that exams are tough and it takes a certain kind of person to do it (some people just aren't test takers). But there are no writing assignments, there's less thinking about what you're learning. So you learn things, and you learn how to take a test; however, you don't apply the knowledge and write a properly formatted 6-page paper with multiple sources demonstrating you grasp the concepts. If the internet has taught me anything it's that people need to learn how to write.

So far at Peru my classes have been do a discussion board topic, reply to X students, write a paper or two, or do a project in addition to weekly quizzes over the reading. So every week I get to write and apply the knowledge I've learned from the book. Plus there's the social interaction between the students.

From the one CLEP I've taken so far, yeah I'm sure I've retained about as much about Sociology as I would have taking a class. With the exception exam day, I didn't get a chance to apply any of that knowledge.