 In this video, I'm going to be revealing how you can get a science education bachelor's degree in as little as a year. And in this particular case, I'm going to be talking about how you can do it at WGU, which is also known as Western Governors University. And this is all possible because of something known as competency based education. And this is different than traditional education, which basically tries to fit every single degree into that four year model, right? So bachelor's degrees, people say that it takes four years. Actually, it takes 5.1 years on average. But yeah, they try to fit every single type of degree, whether it's the most difficult degree you can possibly take, like engineering physics, or whether it's one of the easiest degrees you can possibly get, they try to fit all of them into that four year model, whereas competency based education lets you finish the degree faster if it's possible to. And there are many different degrees out there that are relatively good when it comes to the statistics, like they have good job placement rates, and they tend to pay pretty well, where you can finish the degree relatively quickly. So there are other universities besides WGU, and I'm going to kind of get into that later on in the video, there are other really good competency based universities. But in this particular case, just to make things simple, I will be using WGU as an example. And until now, I haven't really revealed my methods to anybody other than my paid consulting clients. But I did two videos on this sort of method a little bit. And people really loved it, it got a great reception, people asked me to do an entire series on it. So that's what I'm doing right now. So if you appreciate me revealing this insane amount of value that might save you like three to four years, $100,000, as well as a ton of time and effort, go ahead, gently tap that like button, and let's jump into it. All right, so this is a four step process, and you don't want to skip any of the steps, you want to follow it exactly as I say, and the first step is going to be for you to transfer in your existing credits. Now this probably sounds really simple, right? All you got to do is get your transcript together and send it in and that's going to be your existing credits, right? Or you might be thinking, oh, I don't have any existing credits to transfer in. Well, competency based universities like WGU tend to be extremely gracious with the credits that they accept. So for instance, they will accept military experience and work experience in some cases, they also accept certifications and certificates in many cases. And of course, they'll accept the usual stuff like CLEP exams, AP and IB classes during high school, as well as any college credit that you currently have. So make sure you get all of this information together, think of all the things that you might be able to transfer in, talk to your counselor, send them your transcript and your resume, etc. And then they are going to tell you which classes you can test out of, and they'll send you back a list of classes that you still have to take. So at this point, you want to go ahead, move on to step number two, which is the most important step, and that is you are going to use third party companies to test out of many of the remaining classes, right? And the reason you're going to use these third party companies instead of just enrolling in WGU and taking the classes there is simply because they're faster, cheaper and easier. Now the third party companies I personally recommend are study.com, Sophia.org and straighterline.com in that order study.com is my favorite, then Sophia.org is my second favorite and straighterline is my third favorite. And the people that I've worked with and I have just had a really good experience with study.com, especially Sophia.org is pretty good as well. And then straighterline is good for certain classes. And by the way, if you're getting a little overwhelmed, I don't blame you, but I do have an entire spreadsheet. It's basically a cheat sheet that will make this entire process ridiculously easy. And I'll put that down in the description as well as the pinned comment below. Now by the way, this science degree is the secondary biology education science education degree. So if you're familiar with different education degrees, like some of them will have sort of like specialties and classes that you sort of focus on. And this particular one is the secondary biology education science degree. And for this particular degree, you only have to take 39 classes. Now some of my students are able to test out of one class per day, sometimes even multiple classes per day if they have a lot of time. But even if you're super busy, you have a full time job, you've got a family, etc. You can still very comfortably test out of about one class per week. So if you do the math there, 39 classes, one class per week, you can test out of these classes very quickly. Of course, you can't take all 39 using study.com, but you can knock out a significant amount of them. So once you've tested out of all the classes that you possibly can using study.com, you're going to go ahead, transfer those into WGU. And then you're going to move on to step number three, which is you want to pre study the remaining classes, right? So a lot of people skip this step. This is very important. And the reason you want to pre study the remaining classes is because at WGU, and most competency based universities, you are going to pay per term. So at WGU, depending on the degree you're going for, it's usually like $3,500 to $4,000 per term. Each term is six months. So realistically, what you're aiming for here in terms of the time you're actually enrolled at WGU is to finish the degree in two terms. And you can do that if you pre study the classes, right? So imagine taking a class that you're already an expert on, like imagine taking like a basic English class when you already know English. Well, that's what it's going to feel like if you pre study the classes, you're going to be able to just zoom through those classes as fast as possible. And that's going to save you a ton of money. I've seen many different situations where people skip the pre studying phase, and they end up, you know, taking like two terms, maybe three terms, and then they'll end up having to take like one extra month of an extra term. And unfortunately, you have to pay the full price, even if you only take like a few weeks or a month extra term, even though the entire term lasts about six months. So you don't want to end up in a situation like that, because that's just going to make you feel really bad, you're going to have to spend a bunch of extra money. Now I do understand sometimes people will tell me, Oh, I'm too busy. I can't pre study all of the remaining classes. Okay, fair enough. Go ahead and pre study the most difficult ones at the very least. Now what I recommend when it comes to pre studying, there's really two phenomenal resources. And those two resources are the WGU subreddits and the WGU Facebook groups. And in the subreddits and the Facebook groups, there's a bunch of people who are doing the exact same thing that you are doing, or they've already done it. And they share tips, tricks, strategies on how to study for these classes, as well as passing the test as fast as possible. And by the way, there are typically going to be like specific subreddits for the degree that you are taking. So definitely use those resources because they are invaluable. These people will tell you exactly what you should study in order to pass the test as quickly and efficiently as possible. But with that being said, there's lots of great resources online. Of course, you want to get a hold of the WGU curriculum. There's Khan Academy. There's great blogs. There's great YouTube channels. If you want to spend a little extra money, Udemy has some great classes as well. And if you're the textbook type of person, there's free textbooks online. There's paid textbooks online that are relatively cheap. And of course, there is physical textbooks that you can order on Amazon, order them when they're like a few years old, and they're probably going to be like 20 bucks or something. It's very reasonable. But once you feel confident, you're going to go ahead, move on to step number four, which is you are going to finally enroll in WGU and knock out the remaining classes as fast as you possibly can. So this one's pretty self-explanatory. Talk to your enrollment counselor. Tell them you want to finally enroll. They're going to be super happy, I'm sure. And then enroll and knock out the classes as fast as you possibly can. Now, again, you want to leverage the Facebook groups and the WGU subreddits. They're going to be really good resources for you. You can also talk to your teachers, especially for the more difficult classes. So here is an example of somebody who was able to finish the WGU degree in 13 months. Now, I don't think they get into the details here, but it looks like they took three terms instead of two. It's definitely possible to do it in two terms. So this is a perfect example. Again, I don't know their details, but it's possible that they didn't do the pre-study method. And so it took them 13 months instead of 12 months. And unfortunately, that costs them several extra thousand dollars. Here's an example of somebody who has also taken the same degree. And it took them about 1.5 years or so. And again, it looks like they're probably on the cusp of having to take an extra term. So they might end up spending a few extra thousand dollars. So this is why it's so important to follow this entire guide step by step. But even if you do end up taking like an extra month or two, I mean, it's not that big of a deal. It's still like one and a half to two years versus 5.1 years on average that it takes to get a degree in the US. So overall, the strategy summary, step one, transfer in existing classes, step two, test out of as many classes as you can using third party companies, step three, pre-study the remaining courses, and step four, enroll and knock those classes out as fast as you possibly can. So let's go ahead and jump into the cheat sheet. And I'm going to take you through step by step exactly what it would look like for you to do this process. And I'm going to show you how you can do it for yourself. All right. So now we are inside of the cheat sheet. And I will go ahead and show you exactly how to use this. And again, it's down in the description in the pinned comment below. If I forget to do it, let me know. Sometimes I do forget. But yeah, this is one where you can just go file, make a copy and then you can basically edit it and follow along. The only downside to making a copy is if I do update the cheat sheet, which I will from time to time, you will not see it on the copy. So just keep that in mind. You might want to check the original every once in a while. So for instance, I know some people were requesting that I put in the Sophia.org classes. So I might do that in the near future. But with that being said, let's go ahead and just go over the sheet really quickly. So on the far left here, you can see that these are the class IDs. So these are the class IDs at WGU, right here is the name of the class that you would take at WGU. And by the way, if you want to go to one of the other competency based universities, all you'd have to really do is just you know, change this and use the same sort of sheet. And then third here, this is the amount of units for each class. This column here is probably the most important one. And these are the study.com transfers. So basically, just to make this extremely simple, if you take English 104 at study.com, which is the SDCM 0057 class, that will transfer in for English composition one. So just to make this super simple, hopefully you can kind of understand that this makes the entire process really easy, because you don't have to go searching for it or anything like that. In fact, you can literally just click on this, and it will take you to the study.com class. So everything is just like stupidly easy. Now, one thing I will say really quickly as well, the classes that are color coded in green tend to be the easiest ones. Yellow classes tend to be a little bit harder. And then the red classes are the hardest ones, but that's just generally speaking, it's not necessarily true for all the degrees. So let's go ahead and get into it. We'll start off with step number one, which is you would transfer in your classes. And in this particular case, I'm just going to make this like obviously, I'm just going to come up with an example. But yeah, you'd click down here on the transfer in tab. And in this particular case, let's just say you took biology like AP biology during high school. Let's say you also took AP math during high school, right? So you're able to transfer those in. And then on top of that, you took a semester of college and you were able to transfer in art and astronomy as well. So you're able to transfer in a few classes there, you'd go ahead, make sure those transfer into WGU or whichever competency based university you are using. And then you would move on to step number two, which is testing out, you would go ahead and test out of all of these study.com classes. And by the way, when you go to check out with study.com, if you use the code Shane hummus, you will save 30% off of your first three months. So they were nice enough to give me a discount code. And on top of that, you will be helping the channel out as well. So if you appreciate me doing all this hard work for you, go ahead, use that discount code and you will get 30% off. So you'd go ahead, take all of these classes, which honestly shouldn't take you too long. And then once you are done with all of those classes, you'd go ahead, transfer them into WGU, and you would move on to step number three, which is you would pre study the remaining classes. So as you can see, you were able to knock out a good amount of those classes. And you have these ones left. So you'd go ahead, pre study them again, highly recommend using the WGU subreddit as well as the Facebook group. But with that being said, if you are too busy, I would focus more on these classes right here that are in the red, because to be honest, the ones in the yellow are relatively easy. So once you feel confident about your knowledge, you would go ahead and roll in WGU and then knock these classes out as fast as possible. And remember, your goal is to try to finish in two terms that's going to save you a ton of time, effort and money. And then once you've finished in two terms, which is about one year, you're going to go ahead, brag to all of your friends and family, they're going to think you're a genius for being able to finish a bachelor's degree in one year. And if you're nice enough, you will share this video with them so that they can do it as well, because this is basically like a cheat code for getting educated. Now, one thing I want to quickly say, a lot of people are skeptical when they hear this. And I completely understand. There's a lot of really scammy like for profit universities out there. WGU is not one of them. They are regionally accredited. They're a top 10% university and they are respected in many different industries. If you don't believe me, just go ahead and look up countless amounts of testimonials on YouTube, Reddit, etc. But with that being said, always make sure you do your own research and take whatever people say on the internet with a grain of salt. WGU could be doing a great job right now, but a year or two from now they stop doing a good job. That's entirely possible. Now, with that being said, WGU has a lot of pros, but they also have some cons. And one of those cons, of course, is it's completely remote, right? So that's like one thing where if you don't want to go to a remote university for whatever reason, it's probably not going to be a good option for you. It's also a little bit difficult to network at WGU. It's not going to quite have the same level of networking experience as a brick and mortar university. So if you are curious about the pros and cons of WGU, or if you want to know some alternatives to WGU that can in some cases be even better, go ahead and check this video out right here because I dive deep on that subject.