Credit+Attainment+vs+Credit+Recovery

Description: Students fail classes for a variety of reasons but just because a student failed a class doesn't mean the student did not learn anything in that class. Recognizing this, I felt it reasonable to distinguish a student who has failed a class, sometimes twice, from a student who has yet to attempt the class.

Analysis: With this in mind, I created credit recovery and credit attainment courses in our online learning program, Compass Learning. Credit recovery allows students who have previoulsly failed the class the ability to pretest and with a passing grade, test out of units/chapters of learning within that course. As opposed to a credit attainment class where a student is attempting the class for the first time; the student would have to complete all the assigned tasks of learning with no option to test-out.

Reflection: I think this differentation in classes is important, ﻿since most students at AOL are generally eight or more credits short of graduation. Valuable time should not be wasted if the student can demonstrate through pretests, knowledge already acquired. A select few of students have been able to test out a couple of units, thus giving the student more time to devote to the many other classes needing to be completed.

Of course some classes are better suited to test out of, like health and civics. While some classes like English are just too difficult to test out of because of the amount and variety of learning within an English class.