Sample COSC General Education Requirements Roadmap

This page is a work in progress. If you have questions, please ask on the forum

This is meant to apply to the General Education Requirements for Charter Oak State College. You may need additional planning or modification for specific degrees.

= Information = As of 2020, COSC limits students to 90 credits from their approved list of partner institutions. You are allowed to bring in additional credits but they must come from RA sources. TECEPs and UExcel exams are counted as RA credit.

Students are also required to take at least one science class that has a lab component. Additional science classes may be brought in without labs once the lab requirement has been met.

COSC degrees also require 30 UL credits to be complete. Unlike degrees from TESU, this requirement is not restricted solely to the AOS/concentration. The UL credits may be placed anywhere within the degree, including the electives, with a couple of rules to consider. 3 UL credits will come from the capstone. 15 UL credits need to be in the area of study. The remaining 12 UL credits can go anywhere, including into the electives.

In order to make use of this roadmap, students must keep these requirements in mind. In general, it will be less expensive to meet the RA credit requirement in the General Education requirements instead of in the area of study and students should bear that in mind when planning out which courses to take.

Course Suggestions
For TECEP, UExcel, DSST, and CLEP exams, the information provided below has been taken directly from COSC's website. As a result, except in the case of typos, you can be reasonably sure that these exams will fit into the indicated areas.

For Study.com, Sophia.org, and the various RA credit options, there is less available information and educated guesses may have been made. For instance, any accepted Microeconomics credit should substitute for any other Microeconomics credit. Other substitutions are not as certain. Because of this, please check on the forum or with your advisor before taking your preferred courses.

= General Education Requirements = Including the cornerstone, there are a total of 40 or 41 credits in the General Education requirements. If you do 2 science courses with 2 labs, you need 41 credits. If you do 2 science courses and 1 lab, you need 40 credits.

COSC allows you to complete multiple requirements with a single class/exam. For instance, the DSST exam "Intro (Human) Geography" will fill your requirements for Behavioral/Social Science, Global Understanding, and Non-US History/Culture at the same time. Because of this, a student may be able to fill the basic general education requirements with fewer than 40 credits. The deficit may be made up by what some other schools would call GE electives.

In general, by the time the Liberal Arts credit requirements are met, a student should have more than enough general education credits to graduate. But this is still something to keep in mind, just in case, when planning to obtain a degree at COSC.

Communication
9 credits total: 6 written and 3 oral.

RA Credit options
Written Communication

Oral Communication

Information Literacy
Cornerstone course; must be taken at COSC. 3 credits.

Ethical Decision-Making
3 credits required.

The options listed here under ethics have not been confirmed to work. Check with your advisor.

US History/Government
3 credits

Non-US History or Culture
3 credits

Global Understanding
3 credits

Literature and Fine Arts
3 credits

Social/Behavioral Sciences
3 credits

Mathematics
3 credits

Students in Minnesota must have at least 8 credits of science or math.

Alternate Credit Options
Charter Oak considers CSM Learn to be a 3-credit Liberal Arts elective, not a math requirement.

RA Credit Options
The "Applied Liberal Arts Math" TECEP does NOT count as meeting the math requirement.

Natural Sciences
7 or 8 credits. Students in Minnesota must have at least 8 credits of science or math.

One class must include a lab; the other class can have a lab or not. Most of the options listed below do not have a lab option. Choose accordingly.

Alternate Credit Options
Study.com has a number of science courses not mentioned above, including genetics, geology, physics, etc. Their exclusion does not mean that they do not meet this requirement, only that it is a very long list.

Liberal Arts
Students are required to have a specific number of liberal arts credits, depending on their degree. In the entire degree, students obtaining a Bachelor of Arts degree must have 90 liberal arts credits while Bachelor of Science students need 60 liberal arts credits. These requirements are met concurrently with any other requirements. For instance, students who take the ASU EA Astronomy class for 4 credits and Olivet Nazarene University's General Biological science class for 3 credits to meet the science requirement will also have 7 credits of liberal arts in their degree.

Liberal arts subjects may include: Some capstones, literature & fine arts, music, film, psychology, sociology, criminal justice, organizational behavior (management), politics, geography, economics, anthropology, politics, ethics, English & writing, history, science, communications, computer science, mathematics, philosophy, foreign language, communication.

Liberal arts subjects may exclude: Ethics, business, human resources, marketing, management, education, health care.

The above lists are not exhaustive and Charter Oak holds final sway over whether or not a particular course counts as liberal arts or not. Please note that nursing ethics and legal ethics do NOT count as liberal arts while other areas of ethics should count. Most management/business courses do not count as liberal arts except for select organizational behavior courses that count because of the psychology/sociology content.