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I'm taking this Uni in my free time. I am a full-time at a large IT company, and when I started, I had too much free time. I thought, I don't have a degree, I l

I'm taking this Uni in my free time. I am a full-time at a large IT company, and when I started, I had too much free time. I thought, I don't have a degree, I learned everything myself, let's see what the rigorous side of CS is. Well, UoPeople is both good and bad, as everything in life. On the bad side, some teachers are not only useless, but actively making your experience worse. This is mostly cultural, but teachers coming from Africa and some Asian countries really make you want to stick to the tiniest details of rules and assignments. For example, if you have to write a learning journal (and you will), and the example of an LJ contains entries starting with date such as "DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM", African and some Asian teachers will ask you to correct it from any other format. I found this infuriating. What's more, when I had questions, most often, I got no help from these teachers. Some teachers would be amazing, most teachers would give me a non-helpful question, some would ignore my question outright. I also feel like there's a ton of hoops you have to jump through. An associate CS degree consists of a number of health/philosophy/econ classes that I have zero interest in. This is, again, cultural, as UoP is highly US-centric. If you're coming from other country, you'll realize how many assumptions you had (and how silly the UoP/US system can be). On the good side, however, I do feel like I'm learning a lot. If you really spend time in reading the materials, I have found the exercises in courses quite useful. I'm 100% sure it's not as rigorous as a brick-and-mortar university, no. They will let pass students who have learnt nothing as long as they put in work. But, if you want, you can surprisingly learn a lot. Even after being a number of years in IT (engineering and now architecture), I found something new (especially their Database and other specialized courses are quite good). I haven't done math since high school (my brick-and-mortar degree was not in CS) and some of the math courses were really kicking my ass, which is great. It's also insanely flexible in that it's online. You decide when to do stuff. You decide when to read. There's only deadlines for every week. Other than that, it's up to you. Overall, I think my experience with UoP is quite good, but it takes a very specific mindset. If you're from a poor non-US and non-EU country, I'd say UoP is great for you (provided you can pay for it, since it's still not free). If you're from US or any EU country, UoP degree will have almost zero value in terms of having a degree, but might provide you with a lot of new knowledge. If you're in for the knowledge, I'd say it's nice. If you're in for the degree, I'd say go for Georgia's Tech OMSCS. Feel free to ask any questions if you'd like. I'll be checking replies to this post for a day or two.

znpy 6y ago
Nice review, how does one takes exams at this university?
- BossingAround 6y ago
  All classes have multiple graded activities. There are weekly assignments, that are peer graded. There are three graded exams throughout every term that count to the final grade. There are learning journals that I mentioned, which are teacher graded and contribute to the final grade. And then, there is one final exam, that accounts for something like 30% of the whole grade. Most often, this final test is done online, without any supervision. For some classes (like math classes), there is an online proctor required (ProctorU, costs around 15 bucks an exam). You might have your own proctor somehow, I didn't try that. Grading is another area that I am ambiguous about. Peer graded exercises are kind of hit or miss. Sometimes, the peer marks something as incorrect because they are incorrect. Sometimes, they mark everything as correct because, I don't know, they want to be nice or something. Sometimes, there are mistakes in the grading key that peers should use, and that's the most infuriating to me, because the teachers' attitude towards mistake in grading keys vary significantly (and they mostly correct your grade but not the grading key, so future students will hit the same thing). Overall, the tests for CS courses were, so far, somewhat unimpressive... I've seen questions like "who created C", or "what is the output of this python code" type of questions. The tests are mostly multiple-choice. I'd prefer if the class could elect not to do tests, and do a large project instead. Maybe for more advanced CS courses, that's how they do it, but so far, I've not seen anything like that (and I started 2 years ago, though I took some breaks). It's mostly the exercises and assignments that students are graded on throughout the course where the bulk of learning happens. For the math classes, they were much tougher, where even a multiple choice answer is not making it significantly easier. For math classes, the tests are no joke. The strange thing was that the math classes teach quite advanced concepts that require you to calculate, for example, e^x or a sum of squares, or straight out use R, and then, in the final tests, you're allowed only a four-function basic calculator. That's amazingly frustrating to me, and I ended up guessing a lot of the questions (as in, e to the power of 4 would be probably less than answer A, but more than answer C and D, so B it is).

znpy 6y ago

Nice review, how does one takes exams at this university?

BossingAround 6y ago
All classes have multiple graded activities. There are weekly assignments, that are peer graded. There are three graded exams throughout every term that count to the final grade. There are learning journals that I mentioned, which are teacher graded and contribute to the final grade. And then, there is one final exam, that accounts for something like 30% of the whole grade. Most often, this final test is done online, without any supervision. For some classes (like math classes), there is an online proctor required (ProctorU, costs around 15 bucks an exam). You might have your own proctor somehow, I didn't try that. Grading is another area that I am ambiguous about. Peer graded exercises are kind of hit or miss. Sometimes, the peer marks something as incorrect because they are incorrect. Sometimes, they mark everything as correct because, I don't know, they want to be nice or something. Sometimes, there are mistakes in the grading key that peers should use, and that's the most infuriating to me, because the teachers' attitude towards mistake in grading keys vary significantly (and they mostly correct your grade but not the grading key, so future students will hit the same thing). Overall, the tests for CS courses were, so far, somewhat unimpressive... I've seen questions like "who created C", or "what is the output of this python code" type of questions. The tests are mostly multiple-choice. I'd prefer if the class could elect not to do tests, and do a large project instead. Maybe for more advanced CS courses, that's how they do it, but so far, I've not seen anything like that (and I started 2 years ago, though I took some breaks). It's mostly the exercises and assignments that students are graded on throughout the course where the bulk of learning happens. For the math classes, they were much tougher, where even a multiple choice answer is not making it significantly easier. For math classes, the tests are no joke. The strange thing was that the math classes teach quite advanced concepts that require you to calculate, for example, e^x or a sum of squares, or straight out use R, and then, in the final tests, you're allowed only a four-function basic calculator. That's amazingly frustrating to me, and I ended up guessing a lot of the questions (as in, e to the power of 4 would be probably less than answer A, but more than answer C and D, so B it is).