[Anonymous]

Hi everyone,

I’m searching for community college courses or online couses for my 24 semester units of Accounting Subject.

Just need to take two more classes for the exam, looking for Auditing and Taxation.

Does anyone have suggestions for schools or programs?

I live in San Diego, and it looks like San Diego Mesa College has few courses, do they look okay?:

ACCT 120 Federal Income Tax

ACCT 121 California Income Tax

ACCT 125 Government & Not-for-Profit Accounting

ACCT 135 Principles of Auditing

Also, can my courses overlap as long as I have 150 credits?

For example, if I have 150 semester units including 24 units of accounting subjects, can they be used to fullfill the 20 semester units of accounting study, or do I have to take additional classes to fullfill the 20 semester units?

I know it sounds very confusing.. If anyone knows the answer, please guide me…

Thank you so much!

[Anonymous]

Call (or email) your state board. They are the number one resource when it comes to qualifications. There are some very knowledgeable individuals here but I would feel a lot more comfortable hearing it directly from the people that will be checking off on your courses. I have found my state board (TX) to be very helpful. Boards generally have entire departments, or at least a few individuals, devoted to qualification requirements.

[sdcat23]

I'm also in California, i'm waiting on my last score but need additional credit for the new pathways licensing requirement.

For the OP my understanding is that there are exams that people can take to earn college credit. They are the CLEP, Excelsior exams for credit, and DSST. I believe excelsior is an accredited college which you could request a transcript to be sent to the board of accountancy. The other two you would need to transfer the credits to a college and pay a fee. You would have to do further reading to be sure the colleges you are transferring the credits to accept them.

Also the University of North Dakota has accounting classes that you could register for at any time and complete at your own pace. That said all of these options only have an intro to financial accounting class. But based on my reading if you take intro to financial accounting twice, both will count as long as you took each class at a different school.

I would try to explain the 24 units of accounting and 20 units of accounting related study requirements but i cant, I dont have 4 hours :). I suggest you do some reading on the CBAs website and contact the board of accountancy before you make any decisions as the 2nd poster already stated. Also if anyone has ever had success with excelsior, clep, or DSST please let me know. I plan on calling the CBA myself but i've had no free time in the last few weeks. Thank you

Good luck

[Anonymous]

Thank you everyone, I emailed CBA last night, crossing my fingers for the answers..

[Anonymous]

@sdcat I took a CLEP for my Intro to Financial Accounting and took DSSTs and TECEPs (similar to Excelsior, but through a sister-school, Thomas Edison tesc.edu ) for other requirements. I'm not in CA, though. All of my credit-by-exam credits were transferred in to TESC (my alma mater) and printed on a TESC transcript, which was accepted without issue by my (KY) state board. However, I think you have been led astray if you've been told that mutliple versions of the same course count if from different schools. Intro to Financial Accounting will be seen as a duplicate and only count once if taken multiple ways or from multiple schools. I've even seen people take it in undergrad and grad school both and it count as a duplicate. For credit-by-exam, the only accounting classes that I am aware of is the CLEP/DSST/Excelsior options for Intro to Financial Accounting and the TESC TECEP test for Federal Income Taxation (likely would be seen as a duplicate of any other tax course). For general credits (say if you need 20 more credits, doesn't matter what they're in), CLEP/DSST/Excelsior/TECEP are excellent sources of credits; however, the accounting-specific offerings are limited.

@OP I would suggest using the search bar on this site and searching for “accounting credits” or something like that. There's lots of threads where people share the different online schools and methods they've used to obtain the required 150 and the various subject areas. I know I've seen several discussing this specifically relative to the CBA. I personally used LSU https://is.lsu.edu/ – last I saw they're up to about $600 for a 3-credit class, but are totally self-paced and online, so great to fit around a career with poor work-life balance.

[sdcat23]

thanks for the post Lilla. actually since i've posted i've read on other threads that people have confirmed with the CA Board of Accountancy that the duplicate classes are accepted as long as they are taken at different schools. Seems illogical to me since to me it seems one of the reasons for the increased education requirements is to ensure CPAs have a well-rounded education. Though I'll take it, i have over 5 years of public accounting experience and honestly I'd rather spend my time taking advantage of the learning opportunities at work then sitting in a classroom

[Author]

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