GRE Subject Tests

[perrik]

If you do well on the subject test but DON'T get all 33 credits for the major your only recourse will probably be to retake it. This is because, unlike a major like english, you can't take one or two freshman level classes and wind up clearing the pre-reqs for the lion's share of the available upper level courses. If you fall, say, six upper level courses short of the major according to Excelsior, you won't be able to just hop on line and find a couple courses to take because I don't know of ANY schools other than Excelsior and COSC that will give you actual course credit for taking the GRE. So if you were a couple courses short, even if you could find, say, a "Topology 2" class online, it would be highly unlikely that you would be allowed to take it since you don't have anywhere close to the necessary pre-reqs for it reflected in actual courses on your transcripts.

That being said, I don't know for sure how Excelsior would put it on their transcript. If Excelsior just lists you as having "xx-LL credits, yy-UL credits" than even their transcript won't help you with another school. If Excelsior actual lists your credits as clearing certain requirements, "Calc 1, Linear Algebra 2, etc." then maybe you could get another school to recognize it. Personally, I think it is the former, so you would be s.o.l. So just know that math is kinda' "all-or-nothing" for Excelsior's major, unlike english or psych where you can take a couple lower level courses, or even test out of them with CLEP/DSST/ECE/TECEP/Ohio, and clear the pre-reqs for nearly any remaining courses you need to top-off your credits after the GRE.

I have no idea how auditing or taking classes as a non-matriculated visiting student would work. Somebody else would need to comment on that.

FYI, you can't clear the remaining English credits via freshman classes, either! Excelsior lists the major requirements in their Guidelines publications in sequence, meaning that if you fall short by two classes worth of credit, you'll need to fulfill the last two requirements on the list. I came up one notch short of qualifying for 30 credits on the Lit in English exam, so to complete the major I would have had to take a class from the final category in the sequence (single author study). Finding a single-author class that wasn't Shakespeare was difficult (technically EC shouldn't accept a Shakespeare class for that credit anyway, as a Shakespeare class is part of the normal sequence, but they do) and I decided to just switch to liberal studies to avoid the expense and extra time.

For mathematics, the upper-level sequence is two analysis courses, then two UL algebra courses, then one applied math course in areas like discrete math or graph theory, and finally one applied math course in areas like numerical analysis or mathematical modeling. If you score high enough to get 27 credits, you would be required to take the two applied math courses to finish the major.

And as you point out, it might be tough to register for those UL credits elsewhere if they want proof that you meet the pre-reqs. On the Excelsior transcript, the GRE-based credits are recorded as lumps of pass credit, with X number of lower-level and Y number of upper-level. It's not broken out into what classes in the sequence were considered fulfilled by the score.