I’m not sure how long it takes to receive grade for semester
final exams after they have been taken, but I have heard estimates from other
students of two to six weeks. I just
took the exams on Saturday, and I’m already anxious to see how I fared.
I already know that I will most likely have to re-take the
Principles of Management exam. I ran out
of time and only got through the first half of the exam. Not exactly the glowing performance I was
expecting after spending so much time working on this first semester. Failing any of the exams means having to do a
re-take, and the highest score a Penn Foster student can hope for on a retake
is a 70 out of 100.
One thing that struck me about the semester final exams for Penn
Foster College
is the difficulty level. While some
questions were “softballs”, there were a lot of questions that didn’t deal with
what I thought were the major themes of some of the courses I took. I really had to dig into some of my textbooks
during this exam to find the subject matter covered by some of the
questions. The post-it note system
worked, to a point. Things that I
thought were extremely important in the course were barely mentioned on the exam,
but other subjects given only a page or two in the textbook required
essay-style answers of 15 to 20 sentences.
There is a glass-is-half-full way of looking at this exam
process, I suppose. For those who think Penn
Foster College
is the “easy” way of earning a degree, let me set the record straight now. It is a lot of work. It’s not Harvard or Yale, of course, but it’s
not the easiest degree program I’ve ever taken, either. I have studied at the University of Wisconsin
system, and the courses and exams I have taken during this first year at Penn
Foster College were just as rigorous as any course I took at the UW, and in
some cases, even more so.
Yes, you will definitely “earn” a degree at Penn
Foster College.