Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition (PLAR) has been a system under debate for some time between, businesses and corporations, and educational institutions. The idea of the program is to asses an adult students prior knowledge and equate it to an institutional credit should they decide to return to college or university. However, there have been challenges in determining a standard to which this system could be used in order fast-track ones degree, yet still maintain the quality of information. After reading the article Is workplace learning higher education? By Bruce Spencer and Jennifer Kelly, it should be noted that the more this PLAR program is discussed, more questions appear than solutions. So, the effectiveness of this program is
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The article explains this problem best with an example from the corporate realm where: "ten years work experience can be described as one year 's experience repeated ten times."(44) this creates an issue of quantity over quality. For an applicant, was that decade spent actively gaining additional knowledge or was it spent doing routine tasks everyday? Therefore, out of two applicants, one with more and one with less experience, it is difficult to determine who 's is more credit-worthy and of higher quality. Therefore, for an institution with a PLAR program to say an individual requires 5, 10, or 15 years of experience to receive credit is not …show more content…
Therefore based on the scenarios that were brought up during this discussion, a program with these goals would be more beneficial if it was to be handled on a case-to-case basis rather than a standardized scale simply because each individual has different learning needs, thought processes, and experiences that would require personalized attention from the educational
The article explains this problem best with an example from the corporate realm where: "ten years work experience can be described as one year 's experience repeated ten times."(44) this creates an issue of quantity over quality. For an applicant, was that decade spent actively gaining additional knowledge or was it spent doing routine tasks everyday? Therefore, out of two applicants, one with more and one with less experience, it is difficult to determine who 's is more credit-worthy and of higher quality. Therefore, for an institution with a PLAR program to say an individual requires 5, 10, or 15 years of experience to receive credit is not …show more content…
Therefore based on the scenarios that were brought up during this discussion, a program with these goals would be more beneficial if it was to be handled on a case-to-case basis rather than a standardized scale simply because each individual has different learning needs, thought processes, and experiences that would require personalized attention from the educational