Tuesday, February 10, 2015


By Ben Schiller










1 comment:

Anonymous said...

When comparing the credit hour unit to the competency based learning unit, it really seems as if they can both exist in any college. For instance, older and more motivated students can take competency based classes in order to save time and get the most bang for their education buck. On the other hand, traditional college students can take credit hour classes. This would hold especially true for student looking to move onto graduate school where a specified number of credit hours in particular classes are required for admission.

In addition to this, competency based education could alter how different students attack the coursework for their major. At my undergraduate institution, each class taken, regardless of the subject, was the equivalent of four credit hours. This was especially frustrating for STEM students as students would spend much more time focusing on classes such as organic chemistry or physics as opposed to an English or Public Speaking class. Despite the drastic difference in the amount of time allotted to coursework between these different subjects, students receive the same amount of credit for their efforts. While some schools allocate more credit hours to classes with heavy workloads, colleges would be unable to be successful if they adopted a 100% competency based learning system.

Also, I feel that Master’s programs would benefit from highly structured competency based learning system as students could complete as much or as little of their coursework as they want. Therefore, Master’s degrees could still be quickly attainable for full time students, yet be completed at a reasonable amount of time for part time students who are holding down jobs. On the contrary, I do not think that PhD., M.D., and law school programs would be not conducive to a lot of competency based learning. It seems that these students are already working at their maximum capacity and giving them the option save time and money would be a bad option to allow. Most of these students would try to take on more and either burnout or focus more on simply retaining knowledge rather than learning how to apply new material in a meaningful and practical way.