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Comment by jodoherty | Hacker News Reader

Read the "Credit By Examination" section on this page:

http://www5.njit.edu/registrar/transfer/

If you're willing to self-study and pay for some tests, you could potentially CLEP out of Physics, Calculus, your non-CS lower-level course requirements, etc. Talk to your registrar.

Testing out of all the basic stuff could cut your list of remaining classes by half, and you won't have to worry about some bad score in a history class bringing down your GPA because you only cared about passing.

And even if you wanted to be well-rounded, it'd still be a good way to bypass boring general education courses and get into more rigorous and interesting upper level classes where the professors and the students care more about the subject matter.

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CBE only applies to specific courses. Not upper level.

" For students interested in gaining credit for more advanced (upper division) courses, most of our academic departments offer a limited number of exams in their academic area. Interested students should contact the individual departments and learn about the availability of tests and procedures for being tested. Once the academic department has approved a request for a departmental examination, the student may be referred to the Counseling Center to complete forms."

For CBE we would just give the students the tests in CS100. It doesn't work the same for upper.

Another problem is they want you to parrot back some things that they say. For instance in our OS class we had to learn about Solaris and memorize some commands for Solaris. We had to learn things like what is "JCL". These were not for the operating systems side. This was because the professor did that at his place of work before coming to NJIT. Naturally since he did it, it has to be good for all of us.

The courses are thrown together so CBE is near impossible. I'd say you need to know less about how something actually works and more about what the professor thinks is important.

You were complaining about having to take non-CS classes, many of which sounded like lower level general education classes, so I offered a potential solution: weed out some of those classes with CLEP exams.

I didn't see that your problem was related to your upper level CS coursework. If you aren't even interested in that, then you really should consider taking a break from school before you burn out. Maybe become a TripleByte candidate or something and get a software engineering job at a startup, or look for a local business that needs someone skilled to help them out.

I'm fine with the upper level CS classes but those are the only ones I could dream of making myself self study for.

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