What is ExcelTrack at Purdue Global?
ExcelTrack is Purdue Global's competency-based option: instead of working through a course to earn a grade, you demonstrate mastery of individual competencies and move on as soon as you have. The MSN version is billed at $3,200 per ten-week term. Whether it saves you money is a separate question, dealt with on the ExcelTrack page.
What a competency actually is
A competency is a specific, assessable capability — a thing you can either do or not do. Rather than a course delivering content and testing you at the end, an ExcelTrack programme names the capabilities the qualification requires and asks you to evidence each one.
In practice that means the assessment comes first in your planning, not last. You look at what has to be demonstrated, judge whether you can already do it, and either evidence it now or study until you can.
How it feels different day to day
On a traditional course the calendar carries you: readings appear, deadlines arrive, you keep up. On ExcelTrack there is no such current. Nothing pulls you along and nothing stops you racing ahead. Two nurses can start the same term and finish very different amounts of it.
That is the appeal and the hazard in a single sentence, and which one you get depends almost entirely on temperament rather than intelligence.
What it does not change
- Accreditation. Identical. ExcelTrack is a delivery model, not a lesser qualification, and the degree is the same degree.
- The trial. Still first-time undergraduates only, on either track.
- Attendance. Still logged by submitted work — and ExcelTrack has its own three-week withdrawal clock, so an empty first three weeks removes you.
Who tends to ask about it
Experienced nurses, usually, and with good instinct. If you have spent years doing something that a competency asks you to demonstrate, being able to evidence it and move on is a genuinely better deal than sitting through a term about it.
The nurses it disappoints are the ones who expected it to be easier. It is not easier. It is faster for people who already know the material, and it is the same amount of work for everybody else, minus the structure that would have carried them through it.
Where to go next
If you are trying to work out whether it will cost you less than the standard per-credit track, that turns on your pace and your prior learning rather than on the model itself. The comparison is set out here, and a prior-learning assessment answers the other half.
Is an ExcelTrack degree the same qualification?
Yes. It is a different delivery model at the same accredited institution, not a different award.
How is ExcelTrack billed?
By the term rather than the credit — $3,200 per ten-week term for the MSN, however much you complete.
Is ExcelTrack easier?
No. It is faster for people who already know the material and offers less structure to everyone else.