Ask HN: Any colleges or universities offering credit for CS courses by exam?

OP mentions the potential of doing an MS. I’m curious what the effects of WGU and similar programs are in regards to grad school acceptance.

It’s definitely not on the level of a classic for-profit, in fact I believe it’s accredited and non-profit, but I forget who accredits them. I’m generally wary of any school that invests so much into advertising.

In the US, get an associates degree (which you can speed up by CLEP tests) and you can also knock out a lot of other mandatory but non-major courses for a lot of state colleges, at least. I've had a few friends who did this, getting math or physics associates. Then they were able to primarily take CS courses for their CS degrees with maybe a few other mandatory electives that weren't previously covered (language requirements they couldn't test out of as typical monolingual Americans like me, mostly). This can shorten the time needed for the CS program to a comfortable 3 years, and if you can convince the department to let you skip some of the intro courses (based on professional experience) you might drop it further. Total, then, would be about 1-2 years for the associates (depending on how much you can test out of) and 2-3 years for the bachelors.

Also talk to professors about independent study courses, you may be able to knock out extra course requirements in summer terms where they don't normally offer courses, keeping the calendar (but not semester) time lower.

> CS is way more than just programming

> thinking you can do it without spending time and effort on it is naive

Well, yeah. I am not a 22 year old. I'm nearly 60. I have been developing non-trivial hardware and software for decades. I have both hardware and software I am responsible for that is currently orbiting the planet. Robotics, real time image processing in FPGA's, industrial controllers, video processing, distributed control systems, motor controllers, advanced illumination systems, audio processors, video and audio switching equipment, etc. I can't even remember all the work I have done. Believe me, I know CS isn't just programming. I have studied most of the theory on my own, as well as applied it.

This is hardly wanting to do it "without time and effort", in fact, it is quite the opposite. Someone can get a CS degree in four years and go to work. I went to college for a while and then went to work as a hardware and software engineer for 40 years in a range of industries and applications, from low-level embedded systems to genetic algorithms training neural networks. I think I have put enough time and effort into all of this to not be ashamed of the idea of taking a damn test to pass courses like intro to programming, data structures, algorithms, etc.

I mean, seriously, this is a real question. Why is it that universities assume students know nothing? OK, a high school graduate will, more than likely, fit that category. Someone who has learned through work across many years, even if it is five or ten, probably comes to the table with the vast majority, if not all, of the basic knowledge and likely a good percentage of intermediate and advanced. Yet universities force people to sit down and "learn" variables, loops and branching statements. What a waste of human capital and time.