 How to get a bachelor's degree in mathematics education in as little as one year. That's what this video is going to be about and this is going to be done in this particular case by going to a school called WGU or Western Governors University. Now this is a competency-based education model which means that instead of making you go to school for four years, which by the way it's actually 5.1 years on average, they test you based on your competency. So if you are able to be competent in a certain subject because maybe you already have work experience or you just want to work really hard to get ahead then you can graduate much faster. Now there are other competency based universities that are very similar to WGU and they may have a degree that you're more interested in but in this particular video I am going to be using WGU as the example but with that being said these methods can be used at many other universities in a very similar way. And by the way these strategies and tactics that I'm going to talk about in this video in just a moment up until this series I've only shared with paid consulting clients right. So this is super valuable stuff people are saving like three to four years of their time they're saving tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars and on top of that they are saving a bunch of opportunity cost because during the time where your friends are going to school for four to five years to get their education degree you are going to be working and making money. And then on top of that this is one of those schools where you don't have to quit your job move across the country or anything like that you can do all of it from home in your free time. So if you appreciate me revealing this insanely valuable information go ahead gently tap that like button and let's jump into it right now. Alright so this is going to be a four step process and you really want to follow it step by step you don't want to deviate from this process or else it's going to take a lot longer. Now the first step is the least important step but it's something that you don't want to skip and that is you are going to go ahead and transfer in the existing credits that you already have. Now the reason you don't want to skip this step is because yes WGU does accept all of the usual stuff like AP, IB classes that you might have taken during high school, college credits, CLEP exams but they also accept certifications and certificates and in some cases they'll accept military experience or even work experience. So don't skip this step make sure you get your experience and your transcript and your resume together send that into WGU send it into your counselor and see what you can test out of and once you've done that they're going to go ahead and send you back a list of classes that you still need to take and at this point you are going to move on to step number two the most important step which is you are going to use third-party companies to test out of many of the remaining credits. Now there are tons of posts online that talk about how you can use this strategy so for instance here's one that talks about how you can transfer in 47 of the 122 credits that you need for this degree and by the way this particular mathematics education degree is for the middle grades right so this is designed for you to teach middle school education in mathematics so the reason that you are going to be using these third-party companies rather than just enrolling in WGU right off the bat is very simply because they are faster easier and cheaper so in many cases even if you're super busy you have a family full-time job etc using study.com for instance which is one of the third-party companies you can very easily test out of one class per week and if you're not as busy like many of the students I've worked with you can test out of something like one class per day or even more than that. Now my three favorite companies to use this process with are going to be inorder study.com then Sophia.org then straighterline.com those are the ones that I've just personally had the best experience with with helping people the least amount of you know problems like sometimes they've had you know issues like transferring stuff in or there's like a lot of glitches there's you know stuff like that on the website seems like study.com has their stuff together the most plus it just has a really good UI and it's just a good learning experience overall now some people take this process super seriously and they try to take like you know oh i'm going to take these three classes from straighterline and i'm going to take like these five classes from study.com and these five classes from Sophia and they get really strategic and you know maybe you can save yourself like 30 minutes or an hour here and there doing that but if you just want to keep things simple which is what i typically recommend you can just use study.com for most of them and then Sophia or straighterline for the ones that you don't need to use study.com for so here's an example of someone who commented about their experience going through this degree term one complete got to love wgu some courses took much longer than others but as a full-time mom of seven wgu allowed me to do what i thought was impossible 49 credit units down and degree is now 59 complete the future is bright so this person was able to knock out 49 credit units in one term which is about a six-month period typically that amount of credits would probably take you three to four semesters in a typical school so that would be about two years now another great thing about using these third-party companies like study.com is you don't have to buy a textbook you don't have to pay for any you know fancy extra stuff like i've had universities make me pay to buy a clicker so that i can take their weird quizzes during class i've had other universities that made me pay to buy some sort of like quiz bank and i had to pay like a hundred dollars just to be able to access quizzes in this online quiz bank and if you've been to colleges you probably know what i'm talking about they nickel and dime you they make you buy all this stupid stuff here and there and that's not a problem typically with these third-party companies like study.com or wgu now it can be a little bit difficult figuring out which classes you should take it like study.com or sofia or straighterline and which class is actually mapped to wgu so in this particular case what i did is i made a cheat sheet that is insanely easy to use it will tell you the exact class that maps to the exact class at study.com we'll get into that a little bit i'm actually going to jump into that sheet and go through a step by step example but just know that i put that in the pinned comment below as well as down in the description so you can check that out and you know look at it and follow along and oh by the way there are 39 classes you have to take in order to get this particular degree and once you've tested out of the classes that you can take using the third-party companies you're going to move on to step number three and that is you are going to pre-study the remaining classes now this is another step that a lot of people skip and i think it's a mistake and the reason people skip it in my opinion is a combination of you know the enrollment counselors kind of put pressure on people to enroll as fast as possible because obviously they make more money the sooner you enroll and then the second reason they skip it is just because it can be a little bit difficult figuring out the best resources to study for the classes before you actually enroll in WGU now the reason that you're going to start pre-studying these classes is because your goal is to graduate from WGU as fast as you possibly can and i think a really good goal for this particular degree is to graduate in one year that would be two terms each term is six months approximately and it costs somewhere between 3,400 to 4,000 dollars depending on the degree your goal here what you're aiming for is to graduate in two terms and the best way to possibly do this is to use two resources the first one is going to be the WGU subreddit and specifically you want to go to the subreddit for your specific degree that you are getting so there's like a main WGU subreddit and then there's typically going to be a subreddit for the specific degree you're going for and on these subreddits people will share tips tricks strategies etc on how to study for the classes and pass the test as quickly as possible and typically they will tell you the best resources to study for these classes that you can find either free or very cheap on the internet sometimes that might be a random youtube channel or it might be a random blog uh sometimes it might be something like Khan Academy there's also other really good resources on Udemy they're very cheap resources very cheap courses there there's free textbooks online there's paid textbooks that you can buy online if you're a physical textbook type of person you can order those on amazon for like 20 there's many different options here to find very affordable resources to pre-study and then the second place that i would recommend looking is the WGU Facebook groups so again same thing there's a main Facebook group and then there's Facebook groups for the specific degrees that you might be taking so definitely look for that and it's the same thing there they're going to share tips tricks strategies etc on how to pass these classes as quickly and efficiently as possible it's also a really good place to network now if you don't have as much time what i'd recommend doing is at least study the harder classes right at least pre-study those at the very least that is going to save you a ton of time and it'll probably end up saving you an entire term now once you feel confident go ahead move on to step four and this is where you will finally enroll in WGU and knock the remaining classes out as fast as you possibly can so this step is pretty self-explanatory you're going to go ahead contact the counselor tell them that you want to enroll you're going to enroll in WGU and knock the classes out super fast and it should be relatively easy because you've already pre-studied for them now this is a degree that realistically you can finish in around one year or so so two terms probably you know you could do like one term and then you finish like in the middle of the second term and again use those same resources the WGU subreddits as well as the WGU Facebook groups those can be great resources to get you know up-to-date awesome information from people who are in the trenches doing those degrees right now so here's an example for instance somebody was talking about you know how difficult is probability and statistics and it looks like free fall seven basically said that they were very intimidated by the course but they used Khan Academy to study for it and they even say specifically Sal on Khan Academy does a great job of teaching you how to think through problems rather than trying to memorize formulas and memorize all the different circumstances where you might use them right so that is a great resource they tell you exactly where to go to study for the class now let's go ahead and jump into the cheat sheet really quickly and I'll take you through this entire process step by step I'll give you an example of exactly what it would look like all right so now we are inside of the cheat sheet I'll just take you through it really quickly on the left here you're going to have the class ID the next column is going to be the class name at WGU then the amount of units in each class this column right here is the most important one and that is the classes at study.com that transfer into the classes at WGU so in this particular case you see here if you take English 104 at study.com which is SDCM 0057 that's the the code for it at study.com that will transfer in for English composition one at WGU now another thing that I will mention on here is I will try to keep these up to date and also if people want me to add in like Sophia and straighter line I can do that but I just thought it would honestly just kind of confuse people so I decided to just keep it as study.com but that being said I will potentially upload some more in the future and I might even do it where I kind of like do some research on this and figure out which of Sophia and straighter line have the easiest slash best classes because I know some people do like to really get in the weeds with the strategy there. Another thing I'll mention here is the green classes tend to be those are the general education classes they do tend to be a little easier the yellow classes are a little bit harder and then the red classes tend to be the hardest ones so just keep that in mind that's just generally speaking it's not always true and then also if you want to follow along here and do this with your own particular situation you can go ahead and go file make a copy and that will allow you to edit this so let's go ahead and move to step one which is you want to go ahead and transfer in all of your existing credits so in this particular case I'm just using this as an example of course let's say you took AP biology during high school and you also took AP math during high school so you were able to transfer both of those in and then you took a semester at your local state college you didn't really like it so you dropped out but you did get some credit and and so you took communications art and astronomy while you were there so you get credit for that so at this point we would move on to step number two which is the test out phase and at this point we would test out of all these so if you are in step one and for whatever reason you can't transfer anything in don't worry too much because it's only going to set you back maybe like I don't know a week or two because it's really easy to test out of these classes that you can test out of using study.com so and oh by the way I should probably mention this you can save 30% off your first three months with study.com using code Shane Hommis they were nice enough to give me a coupon code so you can do that as well if I have any other codes for these ones in the future I'll make sure to add them on as well so yeah you would go ahead test out of all the classes that you can test out of and then you'd move on to phase number three which is the remaining classes you would go ahead and pre-study them so you would pre-study these remaining classes using those resources that I talked about before the WGU subreddits and Facebook groups they will recommend the best resources to use and then once you feel confident you are going to move on to phase number four which is you're going to enroll and knock out the remaining classes as fast as possible and then at this point you can go ahead brag to your friends and family that you were able to finish an entire bachelor's degree in one year and if you're really nice you will send this video to them so that they can do the same for themselves. Now one thing I do want to say I get comments about this sometimes WGU is a great school but it's not perfect right there are always pros and cons to anything in life nothing is ever all pros and zero cons so you definitely want to do your research on WGU there are some downsides to it for instance it's completely remote if you are somebody who has a lot of trouble concentrating doing school work completely remotely maybe it's not going to be the best choice for you it's also a little bit limited when it comes to networking because you're not going to be in a physical class with other students that you can network with and I talk about a lot of the pros and cons in this video right here so I highly recommend that you check it out.