How Many Credits to Request?

It’s not always easy to equate experiential knowledge with a particular amount of college credit.

Why a Credit Estimate is Important

Why is it important for you to consider this issue at all?  Why not leave it up to the people who will be doing the evaluation?  Actually, it is important to have some idea of the plausible number of credits you might request for the following reasons:

1. CPL at Empire is not a way of simply packing your degree with credits.  Faculty will review each credit for appropriateness in your degree. It’s useful to have some idea of the likely number of credits you might receive for your knowledge of nutrition or human services management or Spanish, if you are going to include these credits in your degree plan. For example, if you’re planning on twelve advanced-level credits of prior learning in Marketing and the more realistic and plausible number is 4 lower-level credits, you’ll need to consider more advanced-level credits of course work to meet degree requirements.
2. Even though credit through prior learning is about validating your past experiential learning, it can help you develop a sense of the amount of work involved in the new learning – your upcoming courses – at either a freshman/sophomore or junior/senior level and gauge how much work you’ll need to do to complete 4 credits of course work.

Ways to Estimate Credit Amount

So how do you reasonably estimate credit amounts to request for your prior experiential learning?  Janet Colvin, in Earn College Credit for What You Know, discusses different methods (pgs. 115-123), which include the following:

College Catalog/Course Description Method

Check college catalogs and/or the syllabus of a particular course/s.  If you feel your prior learning covers all the material covered by the course, then request the same number of credits.  Some things to consider:

• Check many college catalogs to see if credit is offered in the area of your learning, and how much credit a course usually has in that area.  For example, John Jay College offers credits in Forensic Photography.  In your work as a police officer, you have learned how to take photographs at crime scenes.  You understand the types of shots that might be required for different crimes, e.g., traffic accidents, break-ins, assaults.  If John Jay College offers 4 upper-level credits and you have essentially the same knowledge (and all the prerequisite knowledge), then it might be reasonable for you to request 4 upper-level credits.

• The world of work often allows you to acquire competencies in areas not typically included in a course syllabus.  For example, a course syllabus may cover A, B, C, D, and E, but you have real mastery of A, B, C, F, and G.  Decide if your additional knowledge compensates for any gaps.  The gaps exist, and they may be viewed as important to address in terms of your overall degree, but the additional learning you have may still allow you to legitimately request the same number of credits offered by the course.
• Brainstorm and list out the sub-topics of knowledge you have gained within an overall topic of knowledge, in order to assess your breadth of knowledge in the subject. You may think that if you have been involved in an area for 5-6 years you will have gained greater mastery of the material.  But are you thinking about experience or the knowledge gained from that experience?  Do you in fact have more knowledge or simply more experience with the same knowledge?  How does your knowledge of this subject area compare with sub-topics of knowledge listed in a number of course descriptions for the same or a similar area?For example, with experiential knowledge, gaps typically exist in the area of theory.  To put this another way, you may have seen every British horror movie of the 1960s and know a considerable amount about the genre, but may not have considered the reasons why horror films were so popular during that decade, or may not know the body of a particular director’s work.

Carnegie Formula

This method is a little different.  The idea here is that you “break out” your learning into identifiable, creditable components. The Carnegie formula offers a reasonable method to attach credit to these components:

• 160 hours of learning = 3-4 credits

E.g., if you did training at work that lasted one week (40 hours), it would equal 1 credit, assuming that the training resulted in college-level learning.

Tips for Calculating Credit Amounts

Content from Nan Travers

It’s best not to submit large blocks of credit because it doesn’t provide enough information about what you know. You want to think about how to separate these areas into distinct topics. For example, your knowledge in designing enterprise systems is a different type of knowledge than supporting these systems or managing staff, both of which relate to but are different than designing enterprise systems.

The standard used for calculating credits when any college creates a course is the Carnegie Unit. 1 Unit (credit) = 1 hr of instruction per week + 2 hrs of outside work per week X 15 weeks. The biggest argument against this rule is that it doesn’t provide any information on how to judge the type of learning or the depth and breadth of learning that takes place. When you are trying to assess learning and convert to credit equivalencies, this rule may not make sense. So how do you figure out credits how many credits to request?

I suggest that you make some lists of what you know. Then cluster and theme those together under titles that match the types of learning.

Another way to consider credit amount is to consider teaching your knowledge to another person: What would you teach? How could you break this into lessons?  How long would it take to teach these lessons?

You do not have to assign credits right at the beginning. Take time to write out your knowledge first; that way you will have better information about the extent of knowledge and how that can be expressed in credits.

Most courses at Empire are 4 credits, but your requests can be less (some students request 1, 2, and 3 credits). Some students request more, but 4 is very typical. Once you get up to about 6 credits, it is better to break the request apart into more distinct learning. The exception to this is when the request is for field experience; sometimes these requests come in at more than 4 credits.  However, if the request is 8 credits or more, even though that is not common, consider breaking the field experiences into Field Experience I and II.