“You can question whether or not that meets academic ethics requirements” Um, what? Why wouldn’t it? If you pass the exams, you pass the course – you’ve shown that you’ve acquired the knowledge required to pass the course. I don’t see why there’d be any reason to question anything.

Of course I might be wrong in thinking that the point is to learn and show learning, and to share information, not to respect imaginary intellectual property rights. Trading notes with fellow students is a sign of a good, independent, motivated student.

I have several degrees. Testing out of a class is standard practice in the USA.

Schools are not in the business of educating students so they can graduate with a degree and be successful. All good/positive reasons have been corroded away by greed like every other business. It’s all about money. How many students can we get in? How much can we choke them for before they leave to another school? How long can we keep them locked up in required classes to choke more money out of them? Most colleges look at early graduation as a sign that they did something wrong and need to rearrange the courses so it does not happen again. It all about the dollars.

No Germans have turned up to discuss the case, so a few comments are in order.

German universities are different from American universities– they are more like graduate schools. The German academic secondary school certificate, the Abitur, includes all the foreign languages and math that you will ever need, unless you become an engineer, a mathematician or hard scientist, a philologist, or something like that. There are no general education requirements after the Abitur, so it’s really more like a Bachelor’s degree, earned at the age of nineteen or so, with kids staring serious work at the age of twelve. University students start studying one definite subject, such as law or economics– or they join a fraternity, and start making up for lost time on their adolescence (the classic duel-fighting Heidelberg Korps-student).

Another way in which German universities differ is that they are traditionally “Royal Universities,” even though the Kaiser has since been replaced by a republic, and a series of states, or “lander.” The full professors are civil servants, paid their salary by the government. An assistant professor is known as a “privatdozent,” traditionally meaning that he has no official standing but makes a living collecting fees from students. Private universities are, almost by definition, disreputable, inferior, and suspect.

This school seems to be the:

FOM – Hochschule fur Oekonomie und Management – University of Applied Sciences

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOM_%E2%80%93_Hochschule_f%C3%BCr_Oekonomie_und_Management_%E2%80%93_University_of_Applied_Sciences

It seems to have been founded in 1990, privately owned, and it is apparently a sort of extension school, the German equivalent of the University of Phoenix. It probably caters to people who were not in the academic track in high school, and were diverted to apprenticeships at the age of sixteen. My guess is that this student came in, probably with a regular academic background, and knocked over a whole bunch of examinations for things he had been taught at the age of sixteen or seventeen (at least one foreign language, more likely two, math up to calculus, stuff like that), it seems he spent twenty months mastering the specific content of an MBA, starting from scratch, which is not abnormal, compared to what people do at the better American MBA programs. He may very well have worked an eighty-hour week, half on his job and half on school, and in that case, he would have stood out, compared to people who were working only fifty hours, say twenty on school and thirty on their jobs.

I’m not sure whether there is such a thing as a regular American-style MBA in Germany, in the sense of one being offered by a reputable university. I suspect that a regular German university might have wanted someone with an Abitur to spend, say, four years doing a Ph.D in economics, writing a thesis, and all. Once you get off the main track of an educational system, you find a lot of courses and programs which are designed for people who are not very good at learning from books. The main gateposts of an educational system, such as the German Abitur, are essentially certificates that someone _is_ good at learning from books. There is sometimes a kind of student who is good at learning from books, but who refuses to identify with the values of the university. He wants to get an educational credential which is “good enough,” and get out into the world.