As part of my regular duties, I have various students that come in to the college with previous military experience and/or industry certifications that want to convert these experiences as college credit. Most of the time, we have a set guide for what counts as what, but some of the time it must be evaluated and recommendations given. I’ve been that person in my department that does the initial evaluation and then pass it along to my department chair who agrees most of the time with me. We then forward it to the registrar who will either sign off on and post the credit or seek more information. In a lot of these situations, the American Council on Education (ACE) has already given their guidance on military transcripts, certifications, etc. which just needs verified.
It was through these transcripts that I was interested in how these credits were originally given recommendations by ACE. The more I looked at it, the more I liked what I saw. A general overview of how it works is as follows: An organization will contact ACE seeking a review of curriculum for credit. Depending on the situation, ACE will either fly a team to review or conduct a virtual review. A review team will spend three days looking at materials with first and second reviewers determining the what, how much and what type of credit is to be given, if any. The findings are then given back to the organization which can then decide what changes to implement if necessary and what to do with their recommendations.
I immediately saw that this was something I would enjoy doing and when I saw how to become part of these teams, applied and was accepted as a subject matter expert in several areas of Information Technology. I’ve had the opportunity to participate in a couple of these reviews so far and can say I am impressed with the process we go through to complete the job.
