• Unit 4: Completing a Course

    At this point of Saylor001, you have learned how to become a registered Saylor Academy student as well as locate and enroll in courses. You have also familiarized yourself with the way Saylor courses are structured, including how to navigate through and access course resources. You have even taken your first assessments. Understanding the previous lessons will help you to start and work through other Saylor courses. This unit, however, is focused on teaching you the steps needed to finish a Saylor Academy course. 

    A quick note about what success in a Saylor Academy course means: success is whatever you, the learner, want it to be. The Saylor community is composed of learners from all over the world, of all backgrounds, with a wide array of reasons for choosing to take a Saylor course. Some may be looking to take many courses, all of which will be used towards a college degree. Others may come to us because we offer one course of particular interest. Others still may just want to brush up on one specific topic, or perhaps are simply interested in viewing the next in our series of Tangent Videos. We expect you each to have your own goals, and for many, the measure of accomplishing that goal is not necessarily to have passed a Saylor exam.

    This being said, we do want to have a way to recognize the accomplishment of working through an entire course and successfully completing that course's final exam. In this unit you'll learn a bit more about our scored cumulative final exams and how to earn and access the certificate of completion that accompanies an exam. Finally, we'll briefly discuss the Course Evaluation Surveys.

    Completing this unit should take you approximately 30 minutes.

    • 4.1 About the Final Exam

      • About our Exams Page

        Read to learn more about Saylor Academy's final exams.

      • Accessing and Submitting an Exam Page

        Watch this video that will walk you through the process of starting and submitting a final exam.

        Note: The waiting period between attempts for regular certificate exams is now 7 days, not 14 days as the video states.

      • There is no "activity" for this subunit. Your practice for what you've learned in this part of the course will happen with the taking of the course final exam.

    • 4.2 About the Course Completion Certificates

      • Overview of Accredible Certificates and Transcripts Page

        Watch this brief video, which will explain the process for accessing and customizing your course completion certificates, as well as your Digital Transcript, which are made available through our partner organization Accredible. Certificates are awarded automatically upon the passing of a final exam.

        You will have the opportunity to go through the steps learned in this video after you have taken this course's final exam.

        Note: If you simply want to review all of your grades to do date, but don't actually need to access your certificates or transcript, hover over the "Account" tab at the top of the page, and click on the "Grade Report" link. This page will show you the courses you've enrolled in and the highest final exam grade you've achieved for each course to date.

    • 4.3 About the Course Evaluation Survey