They lied. Highschools do this too. They will try everything to prevent you from testing, because they lose the tuition.

I was told I couldn't test out of calculus (university didn't recognize IB calc), but course prerequisites were easy to get around so I just started registering for higher level math classes. My junior year I went to my advisor and he happily waived the calc requirements.

i am unfamiliar with the accreditation racket, but on the face of it if Berklee lets you test out of 2 years of music theory, surely you can test out of computer science. I know I tested out of 2 years of math.

its probably a more boring answer like university bureaucrats refusing to budge because they just didnt feel like it, which is a rather more tractable problem (in the large; individual students are powerless of course and i have been there too) than the accreditation system.

we need university entrepreneurs to disrupt lazy universities who arent serving their customers well. sadly lambda school has left a black taste on all trying to do this. but i have hopes that freecodecamp will do it the "right" way - patiently.

I spent my childhood learning classical violin and it’s a completely parallel education system that’s unaffiliated with public education and goes back centuries (With freelance teachers, dedicated schools, Church run programs, and so on) so I’m not surprised it’s possible to test out.

The same thing doesn’t happen with computer science.. i.e we don’t send young children to CS tutors 2-3 times a week and make them practice on a daily basis. Perhaps society has yet to master creating virtuoso programmers in the way it has spent hundreds of years perfecting the education of young musicians.