Special thanks to Homeschooling for College Credit parent Amy S. (Michigan) for this excellent feedback about Law Shelf. Law Shelf is our newest college credit provider (NCCRS) that I just announced last month! The company has only a few partner colleges so far, but the classes are currently FREE which makes them an amazing high school option no matter what. Here’s Amy’s post:
Basics about Law Shelf
- Law Shelf courses are free! If you want college credit, you must pay for the final exam ($35) but if you just want high school credit, there is no cost.
- BOGO deal exclusive for HS4CC families! Get 2 finals for $35. Simply email lawshelf@nationalparalegal.edu and provide the code: HS4CC
- There is no age restriction, no application, no transcript, no prerequisites.
- They have 7 partner colleges. In order to get COLLEGE credit for these courses, you’ll have to earn a degree from one of these colleges.
- Anyone can use these courses for free for HIGH SCHOOL credit!
- List of Law Shelf courses
Law Shelf Review by Amy S.
HS4CC parent in Michigan
LawShelf is a fairly new opportunity for earning affordable college credits. My son is pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Liberal Arts degree at Excelsior College. He’s enrolled at Excelsior College and has transferred in 56 credits so far. The most recent 3 credits he earned were through LawShelf.
LawShelf offers course equivalency lists for 7 partner schools including Excelsior College, Thomas Edison State University, Purdue Global, University of Maryland Global, DeVry, Troy University, and American Intercontinental University. The classes on these equivalency lists are guaranteed to transfer to the partner school. The classes are free to take and if you wish to take the voice proctored exam, they at only $35/class (not per credit).
Equivalency List Between Excelsior College & LawShelf
My son and I looked through the list and he is very interested in the classes offered. In fact, he wants to take all of them and transfer several to Excelsior for credit. He decided to start off with the Basics of Criminal Law class. The classes are broken into modules. This particular class has five modules and two case studies. The modules are fairly short videos and each has a corresponding, optional quizzes. I highly recommend having your learner take the quizzes before progressing through the modules. The quizzes don’t count toward the grade in the class, but they help ensure competency and full understanding of the material. Building that foundation is important since the modules build on learned concepts and vocabulary. Also, the protected exam contained several of the questions (verbatim) from the quizzes according to my son. He printed the quizzes and circled the correct answers to have in front of him for the open book proctored exam.
The case studies were longer than the modules and each was about an hour in length. They fascinated my son and he watched them over breakfast. They also have optional, corresponding quizzes. He printed these too and filled them in to use for the exam.
My son also copy/pasted the transcripts for each module and case studies into a single document so he could easily use control-F(ind) during the exam to review material to help him answer the exam questions. The exam is open book/open notes and they even allow you to use google. The goal is for the learner to know how to find the data and interrupt it into concepts they can apply to real-life scenarios.
The initial proctor setup requires a valid government ID. We went to SOS to obtain one for my son but only had the paper ID at the time he was ready to take the exam. I wrote to support and they allowed him to use the paper ID along with a homeschool ID. The process was fairly simple. He had to use his webcam to hold up his IDs and he had to read a passage that was displayed on the screen. He’s dyslexic so that meant a couple of mistakes the first two times, but the verification allows you to re-try the recording of yourself reading the passage. Honestly, they wouldn’t have cared about the mistaken words, but he did. It’s just trying to sample the voice.
Once he submitted the voice proctoring setup, he received an email the next day stating he was all set and could take the exam. He kept his phone near him during the exam and it called him at one point to have him read a passage on the screen. I’ve heard it sometimes asks a question, or to explain one of your prior answers. The correctness isn’t important…just the voice.
In the end, you receive a score that gives you a percentage and you’ll be notified in email when you can claim your badge and request a transcript. Transcripts are sent through Parchment, so we paid the $5 to have it sent right away, although you can gather up credits and have them all sent at once instead if you prefer.
The class videos and case studies were very interesting for my son and he’s excited to take more classes through LawShelf. He completed this first one in a week.
