Walden University’s Office of Degree Acceleration offers undergraduate students the option to earn credits by evaluating college-level knowledge and skills gained from prior learning experiences. This prior learning may have come from work experience, on-the-job training, volunteering, intense personal experience, career school education or other sources.  Students will develop a portfolio, compiling a collection of the experiences and knowledge from these prior experiences, which will be used for the credit evaluation. The portfolio is comprised of three parts:

1. The Resume
2. The Narrative
3. The Evidence

Students may submit a prior learning portfolio for consideration of credit in two ways: 

Course Match:  Student identifies an existing Walden University course which is available for transfer of credit and develops the portfolio to illustrate the course learning outcomes.

Elective Discipline Match:  Student identifies an approved discipline and maps prior learning to a collection of 5-8 course outcomes, which credit is applied to lower-level general electives.  A student may only choose this option once in the pursuit of portfolio credit.

The Prior Learning Assessment Rubric applies to all prior learning assessment portfolios submitted to the Office of Degree Acceleration for review. Meeting the minimum requirements (70% or 210 points) will earn up to 5 quarter academic credits. The rubric provides explicit criteria for the standards that must be on display in an assessment portfolio to pass. Students are expected to showcase the prior learning and knowledge of a particular discipline or course by meeting the learning objectives essential for displaying skill mastery.  The rubric will be used by all trained Walden University faculty portfolio assessors.  All requirements of the rubric must be completed fully for students to pass the course.