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I came across an article about a U.S. college cracking down on shoddy transfer credits, and it got me to thinking. I think I’ll never understand the U.S. obsession with athletes – is it about ego? Money? It’s pretty clear it is NOT about academics. But that’s not what this post is about.
American peculiarities aside, figuring out transfer credits really shouldn’t be that hard – if the syllabus is fairly close to the target course, just let the student write an exam – and grade it the same as any other student. If they can pass the exam, then it’s reasonable to assume that the course is close enough. If not, then don’t give them credit.
I know it takes a bit of time, but not that much – when I was still at the UofC I set up challenge exams* for the 1st year computer science classes. If someone was starting and thought they knew the 1st year material, they could write an exam that covered the 1st or both CS courses, and if they passed, those courses were waived. They didn’t get credit, but they also didn’t have to sit through stuff they already knew. They still had to make up the credits, but that was never a problem. Even when we had 1200 people enrolled in 1st year, I only dealt with a few of these each year. No big deal.
If the student has verified credit for a course that is fairly close to a local one, then let them write the exam. If they can pass the final exam for the course, doesn’t that mean they know the material well enough to get credit for it? If you’re not willing to do that, then why force the student to take the course again? Money? Arrogance? Some narcissistic need to prevent people from getting a break you didn’t get?
What purpose is served by forcing a student to take what for them is a remedial course?
Last summer Mt. San Antonio stopped counting the online classes. It found that several failed to meet the college’s minimum math requirements. College officials also found that Adams State was lax in its oversight of examinations, according to emails obtained by The Chronicle in a public-records request.
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Of all the people equipped to catch shoddy online classes, admissions directors would appear to have the most tools. They can tell when students take courses out of sequence and detect other suspicious patterns in transcripts. But they don’t always have the time or inclination to challenge the abuses. Athletics-compliance directors, whose jobs include certifying players’ eligibility, say they sometimes spot questionable credits but often can’t do anything about them.
* I had created programming language independent exams so they could use whatever language they knew. If the language they knew was other than the one we were teaching, it was up to them to make up the difference.
You assume that the course can be reasonably checked with a single exam. That may be true for some courses (where learning a commonly accepted body of knowledge or skills that can be checked in short problems), but not for courses that call for developing skills that take much longer to check.
Personally, I’d prefer a one on one interview, but that requires that the powers that be actually trust the judgement of the examiner. More and more, it seems that trust is not something we do in the Academy, and that’s a real shame.
My experience in my classes has been that the more I trust my students, the more trustworthy they become. (Sure, there are always a few who try to take advantage of that, but most of them aren’t really that smart, OR that hard to catch, and they sure as hell aren’t worth the time it takes away from those who actually want to learn.)