The following is a guest post by The Happier Husband. During his 22 year military career he has earned 3 degrees and numerous certifications most of them for free thanks to the educational benefits provided to him by the military.
Last post I promised that I’d tell you about how I got 27 free undergraduate college credits in one day. I used cheapest, fastest, and most overlooked method to accrue college credits – CLEPs. CLEP stands for College Level Examination Program. CLEPs are basically exams you can take that will earn you 3-6 undergraduate (bachelor level) credits per test.
There are 34 CLEP exams and 37 DSST exams that can earn you more than enough lower level undergraduate courses to cut your path to a B.S. or B.A. in half. The beauty of the program is that you can’t lose. The scores for credit are based on the mean scores achieved by college students that earned at least a “C” in the class for which they took the test. This means you only have to get an average score to qualify for credit. You don’t need to be a genius, you just have to test as well as the average college student.
You can do it – but if you don’t get a high enough score, there’s a feature to this program that stacks the deck in your favor. When you order your transcript you can elect to have the transcript only show the tests that earned you credit. That’s right – MIT doesn’t ever need to know that it took you 17 times to get 3 credits for Human/Cultural Geography, they just get the successful score.
The best part about CLEPs, if you are active duty, you don’t pay a dime for these tests and you can earn literally hundreds of college credits accepted ay thousands of schools across the US.
You can earn credits in:
Business
Financial Accounting
Introductory Business Law
Information Systems and Computer Applications
Principles of Management
Principles of Marketing
Business Law II
Business Mathematics
Human Resource Management
Introduction to Business
Introduction to Computing
Management Information Systems
Money and Banking
Organizational Behavior
Personal Finance
Principles of Finance
Principles of Supervision
Principles of Financial Accounting
History and Social Sciences
American Government
Human Growth and Development
Introduction to Educational Psychology
Introductory Psychology
Introductory Sociology
Principles of Macroeconomics
Principles of Microeconomics
Social Sciences and History
History of the United States I: Early Colonization to 1877
History of the United States II: 1865 to the Present
Western Civilization I: Ancient Near East to 1648
Western Civilization II: 1648 to the Present
Art of the Western World
The Civil War and Reconstruction
Ethics in America
A History of the Vietnam War
Human/Cultural Geography
An Introduction to the Modern Middle East
Introduction to World Religions
Principles of Public Speaking
Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union
Technical Writing
Western Europe since 1945
Criminal Justice
Foundations of Education
Fundamentals of Counseling
General Anthropology
Introduction to Law Enforcement
Lifespan Developmental Psychology
Substance Abuse (formerly Drug and Alcohol Abuse)
Humanities
Science and Mathematics
Biology
Calculus
Chemistry
College Algebra
College Mathematics
Natural Sciences
Precalculus
Astronomy
Environment and Humanity: The Race to Save the Planet
Fundamentals of College Algebra
Here’s to Your Health
Physical Geology
Principles of Physical Science I
Principles of Statistic
Composition and Literature
American Literature
Analyzing and Interpreting Literature
English Composition
English Literature
Freshman College Composition
Foreign Languages
French Language (Levels 1 and 2)
German Language (Levels 1 and 2)
Spanish Language (Levels 1 and 2)
Get out there are beat my record of 27 credits in one day!
This post is part of the series, Making it in the Military, dedicated to helping service members and their families make the most out of their time in the service. You can find the rest of the articles here.
