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Finishing your degree faster with exams — in plain words

The plain-language companion to the technical feasibility + architecture memo.

The idea

Some colleges let you skip classes by passing an exam (CLEP, DSST) or by transferring credit you already earned. A few schools — Thomas Edison (TESU), Excelsior, Franklin — are built around this. Others, like WGU and UMPI, work differently: a flat-fee term where you prove what you know at your own pace. Andrew's ask was: help people finish a degree they already started, using the cheapest honest path.

WorkWingman can help — but only if it is scrupulously honest. The dangerous version of this feature would tell someone "pass these five exams and you're done!" and be wrong, costing them real money and time. So the whole design is about never over-promising.

The honesty rules (why the app is careful)

  • It shows an estimate, never a guarantee. No promised graduation date, no exact total cost.
  • Every number is cited to the school's own published page, with the date it was checked.
  • If a school confers degrees by competency (WGU) rather than testing out of classes, the app says so — it never pretends you can "test out" where you can't.
  • It can never show you as "done" while you still owe the school required credits (like a capstone). That is the one mistake this feature exists to prevent.
  • Before anything that costs money ("go buy this exam"), it makes you confirm with the registrar.

The exam and school data lives in small, hand-curated "snapshots" — one per school — that link back to the school's own catalog. The app reads these locally; it does not scrape live websites.

Keeping the data trustworthy over time (the T4 work)

Curated data goes stale. Schools move pages, change policies, and update catalogs. So we built three safety nets — the "snapshot governance" layer.

1. A provenance check that runs every build. Before any snapshot can ship, an automated test confirms each one names who reviewed it, when, and links every claim to a source. A snapshot missing its homework fails the build. New schools are checked automatically — nobody can slip in an unsourced one.

2. A link-health check. A separate automated job visits every citation link and asks "does this still exist?" - If a link is gone (404) or now redirects to a different website, the build fails — we can no longer stand behind whatever it was citing, so that row has to be fixed or removed. - Some school sites block robots (WGU returns "Forbidden" to anything that isn't a real browser). We know those, so a "Forbidden" from them is treated as "the page is fine," not "the page is dead." Otherwise we'd get a false alarm every single run. - A couple of sources can't be checked automatically at all — a login-only portal (UMPI), a scanned PDF catalog (Excelsior). Those are flagged "a human needs to re-check this" and skipped, rather than failed. - Anything flaky (a site that's briefly down, rate-limiting us) is just a warning, so a hiccup on some school's server never blocks unrelated work.

3. A remote "kill switch." If we discover after release that a snapshot is wrong — a mistyped number, a policy the school quietly changed — a maintainer can switch it off without shipping a new version of the app. They add the school to a denylist; within a few minutes every running copy stops serving that snapshot and shows why instead. Two safety properties matter: - The kill switch is safe when the network is down: a maintainer's "off" switch is never accidentally turned back "on" just because the remote list couldn't be reached, and an outage can never accidentally switch everything off. - A maintainer can pull one bad version of a snapshot while a corrected version keeps working.

Together these mean: the app only ever serves degree-completion data that is sourced, still-reachable, and not known to be wrong — and if something slips through, it can be pulled in minutes, not weeks.

What ships first

A small, heavily-cited set of schools (TESU as a seed, then Franklin/Excelsior/WGU/UMPI), an estimate-only experience with visible "freshness" badges, and a required "confirm with the school" step before spending money. It is hidden behind a feature switch (education.degreeCompletionPlanner, off by default) until the real, registrar-verified data is in.