01Three numbers, and which one belongs to you
The first is the days left before the term flips, which you read off a calendar and cannot argue with. The second is the wait between sending an assessment in and getting a result, which your programme publishes; look it up rather than assuming a figure that flatters your plan. The third is the days per week you can genuinely give this, counted from a bad week rather than a good one.
Only the third is yours. The wait belongs to somebody else's workload and does not shorten because your term is ending. Two students with identical working weeks routinely finish different numbers of courses, and the difference is never effort. It is that one of them sequenced around the wait and the other planned as though it were zero.
02Two instruments spending two different currencies
An objective assessment spends your days. Preparation, a scheduling slot, a sitting, a result. Nothing in that chain waits on another human, so a term built entirely from these is limited by your own working week and by nothing else.
A performance assessment spends the queue instead. Write it in three days and it still sits for the full wait. Get it back with aspects marked as not passed and you spend the wait a second time, on top of the days the rewrite costs. That is why the honest price of a performance assessment is its drafting days plus one wait, and plus a second wait for the first one of a kind you have never written before.
- Read every remaining course and note whether it carries sittings, written tasks, or both
- Price each written task as its drafting days plus one full wait, at minimum
- Add a second wait to the first task of any kind you have not written before
- Price each sitting as preparation days plus a scheduling slot, with no wait attached
- Total the waits on a separate line from the working days, because the two run concurrently
03The calculation, run on twelve weeks
Twelve weeks is eighty-four days. Count the written tasks inside her five courses and attach a wait to each. Count the sittings and attach preparation. The waits do not simply add to the working days, because you work on one course while another sits with an evaluator, and that overlap is where acceleration actually comes from.
One wait, though, overlaps with nothing. The last one. Every written task has to go in at least two waits before the term flips, or a return arrives with nowhere to land and the course closes unassessed. Count backwards from the flip to get that date, then count how many first submissions fit before it. Hers came out below five. Moving one course to the next term in week one is a decision; discovering the same thing in the final fortnight is a loss.
04Sequencing, and what a nearly finished course is worth
Put the task-heavy courses at the front so their waits run underneath your work on the sitting-only courses. Keep the closing stretch of the term free of first submissions entirely, and use it for sittings, which answer immediately. Anything left in the queue when the term flips is worth what an unopened envelope is worth.
That is the fact the whole calculation rests on. A course at nine tenths finished scores as zero courses, and the effort inside it is not lost but it is not banked either. Acceleration is therefore a scheduling discipline rather than a work rate, and the students who clear the most courses are usually the ones who attempted a smaller number and sequenced them properly.
Where the sittings rather than the schedule are the constraint, drilling to the competency list is a separate objective and it runs under exam preparation.
FAQQuestions to control
Can I shorten the wait by asking?
No, and planning as though you might is the single most common error in these terms. The wait is a queue, and your submission joins the back of it alongside everyone else finishing a term at the same time as you. What you can control is when you join the queue, which is why the calculation places the last submission two full waits before the term boundary.
Is it better to attempt more courses and let some slip?
Attempting more spreads your days thinner and adds returns, which spend the queue. A course that slips is not free; it consumed drafting days that another course needed. The stronger play is to name a realistic count, close those courses completely, then start the next one early if the term still has room. Closed courses are the only ones that count.
Is this an official Western Governors University resource?
It is not. Scholoron operates independently of Western Governors University: no affiliation runs between the two, and there is neither endorsement nor sponsorship in either direction. Anything official lives in your pacing guide and your programme handbook, which are the documents to read for the actual wait times. The arithmetic here comes from working inside competency-based formats since 2016.
What if a task comes back twice?
Then that course has consumed three waits and probably will not close this term, and the useful response is to say so early rather than to keep resubmitting into a closing window. Read the returned aspects rather than the whole task; a second return on the same aspect usually means the evidence being asked for is somewhere you have not looked, not that the writing is weak.
