Question for Big Three Gads who Went on to Grad School

[cookderosa]

Some of us come to the "big three" with a ton of credits from previous attempts at college. Personally, I am having to start from scratch. What credits I do have are from an institution that was on a "quarter hour" system instead of "semester hours"; these translate at a steep "discount" and are basically worthless.

Fine. I'll leverage CLEP/DSST/Study.com and whatever else  I can, until I have enough of the right combination of credits to graduate. If I do that, I'll accumulate a ton of ACE/NCCRS credits that will show up as PASS/FAIL on my transcripts. Not a big deal, though a relatively few GPA graded courses will drive my GPA.

If I ask, "can I get into a [real] grad school — for example a state school — with almost entirely ACE/NCCRS credits on my TESU transcript" I'll no doubt hear, "it depends, talk to the grad school you're thinking of attending." Fair enough, but I'm trying to chart the most effective course I can here. I don't yet have a specific grad school in mind yet, and I can hardly call every grad school in the country worthy of the name and ask them their take on the matter — I don't have that kind of time.

My questions are:

• If you got mostly ACE/NCCRS credits and and graduated from one of the Big Three, what challenges did you have getting into grad school? How did you overcome those challenges?
  
• Did any of you get into a State school?
  
• Somewhat more generally, what advice would you give someone in my position who expects to go on to grad school eventually?
  
• Is there anything you really wish someone would have told you about going from the Big Three to Grad school that never came up anywhere?
  

I might stand alone, but I don't think taking a total pass/fail degree and in the same breath asking about ABC grad school is making the best use of your resources. I believe you have to be a click smarter- if your question was "can I get into grad school" my answer is "of course" but when you add qualifiers, then that changes the question. You have to be preemptive- if you spend an evening looking at a dozen grad school websites that all say they want GPA of X or a certain number of graded credits, then you really need to change your plan.

When I did my TESU degrees, my AA is all ungraded- I used CLEP and DSST. My BA has a lot of graded credit because I knew I wanted to take classes in my major to assure not only grad school admission, but that I got a chance to do academic writing and research in my major.
I'll muddy it up a bit to tell you that my goals changed several times on my journey, and so did my path. Anyway, long boring story short- I got in everywhere I applied.