College Credits 'Faster Than Many People Can Imagine'

A bachelor's degree, one CTRL-F at a time? That's essentially what Washington Post reporter Todd Wallack set out to test when he signed up for Sophia Learning, an online platform that sells itself as a fast, cheap way to generate college credits. For $83.74 and about a month of on-and-off clicking, he completed five courses—two in a single day—and walked away with 11 credits that more than 50 accredited schools say they'll accept toward a degree. Classes were self-paced, open book, and light on traditional rigor: few papers, no live instruction, and tests that could be passed by skimming the online textbook and searching for key terms. "I learned one important lesson: It's possible to rack up college credit faster than many people can imagine," Wallack writes.

His experiment backs a larger trend: "degree hacking," where students use nontraditional providers like Sophia, Study.com, and StraighterLine, plus generous transfer policies at online universities, to compress a four-year degree into just months. "To be clear, these learning platforms are not colleges," Wallack writes. "But many accredited colleges will accept the courses as transfer credit, slashing the time to eventually earn a degree." The model raises questions on how much students actually learn and how easy cheating is. Wallack includes an anecdote on what happened when he accidentally set off Sophia's internal cheating flags. "I spent a week in Sophia purgatory," he notes, meaning he was locked out from signing up for new classes. Sophia, for its part, "said the temporary lockout shows just how seriously it takes academic integrity," Wallack writes. More here.