Western Governors University

The worst experenice in my life. I had technical problems, mentor problems, and they kept putting me in the wrong classed. In almost a year I learned nothing. I am switching to a real university, but they are still making problems for me by claming I still owe them money. For what? they didn't do anything for me.

Although I am easily passing WGU courses, I am not learning much. There is little challenge and poor value for the amount I am paying for this program. I am very disappointed with the lack of quality of education. I doubt the courses I took at WGU will even transfer because they do not have grades. Just pass and fail. I enrolled and found out my military TA would not pay for term based tuition. So I have to do class by class, and that cost significantly more. Because WGU does not provide grades, I found out I have to pay back what tuition assistance I did receive.

successfully completed one term at WGU. I will not go back. It has been a nightmare at WGU. The terms are not six months, because you have to finish before the sixth month. I spent the 1st month doing a bunch of nonsense work on how to be a student. It was a huge waste of time for a worthless one credit. It was more work than the three credit chemistry class. How about the five star review - that claims they completed 57 credits in six months! I can't see how that is done, it takes me weeks to get one assessment scheduled. It takes a long time to get single little essay graded. They made me take courses from the Museum of Natural Science, that did not count, but wasted time. I am an independent worker that had little trouble with the course work. In fact much of it was mundane high school level type stuff. Almost insulting to be doing it at this level. It appeared they were purposely slowing me down. The amount of mis-information they gave me was annoying. The mentor knew less about the topics than I did. I learned very little completing 18 credits in six months. Since I am looking for a challenge, I will be going to a more traditional school. WGU is a joke to those looking to advanced their education. It is good if you want to breeze through a cheap program and get a degree. But to me a waste of money. I want to advance my knowledge and my degree - but I did not get $3,000 worth of knowledge. So WGU is a poor value. They claim to be military friendly, but make you take a full term, which is not easy to do with military tuition assistance.

They have two different programs for each class. One is a lab that requires you to write papers, make posters and do stuff that would not challenge a high school student. The other is a test, which may require some review. For some labs, they require you to enroll into American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) online courses (very good courses), but “enroll” is the key, you don’t have to participate or pass the course, just gather the needed info to complete lab projects that are graded separately in Task Stream. You get zero credit for completing and passing the more demanding AMNH courses. The text books have little to do with the tests or labs. The labs do very little to help learn the competencies. The program I joined involved a list of competencies and, learning resources. With pretests, you would gauge what competencies you knew and which ones you needed to review. Students were required to get a high pretest score to take the final exam. I was very successful in this model and thought I was in a good graduate program. Then the program changed. They stopped giving students the competencies and now it is confusing on what is required. They give you a course guide. The course guide is a jumble of vague test book references and internet links (including Wikipedia!). The course guide is very amateurish and I wonder if they even checked what they are asking students to do. I ran into several very vague reference sites and dead links. They still have the pretest, but stopped giving a report listing what was correct and incorrect, so it does little to prepare for the final exam. The mentors are friendly enough, but I would question their credentials. You have one mentor assigned to you for everything. Mentors are not held responsible for providing inaccurate and misleading information to students.