^Sounds like you and I went to the same college. The University of Taught My Damn Self. I have several doctorates from there.
Know what would be handy? If testing high enough in certain categories meant you could get credit for it and skip ahead. Like, you test so high in Subject A that you can skip all of freshman and half of sophomore-level Subject, you'd be able to just jump into the one you still need. Obviously if you want a degree or certificate you'd have to take some actual classes (because that's how universities work, and some stuff you can't do without that kind of training) but I wonder how many people could get through college with less debt if this was allowed?
Some Ivy League universities are already making some free online classes- the way I see it a dedicated person mastering some subject on their own, getting credit for them, and paying for as-needed classes could get their diploma at far less cost.
That's something I've wanted to see for a long time. I've studied programming for 12 or 13 years (a little hard to gauge since I started in 7th grade, and my school ages were a little wonky as my birthday's in very late September), and I'd like to have some of that credited toward me in a meaningful way. No, I'm not a professional, and there's still more for me to learn...there always will be, but I know enough that a lot of the entry-level college courses would probably be, for the most part, a waste of time rehashing shit I already know. I know object-oriented programming (fun fact: my two favourite languages are C++ and C#), I effing know data structures and how to manipulate them, and I'm even beginning to learn about threading.
It would help if the college which I plan on attending would teach real languages, and not either weird esoteric ones like R (which is mainly for statistical programming) or ones that fucking nobody uses anymore, like pure C. The closest they get, currently, is Java and even THAT is demonstrably inferior to anything in the .Net library of languages. If I could convince a professor to use C# and Visual Studio, I'd be a happy sailor.
Though, if nothing else, I'd be happy if I could move them toward a real IDE that's NOT fucking Vim or Vi. I don't want to touch the filth that's Linux if I can help it.
