Alison
I took three classes at the astronomy…
I took three classes at the astronomy program as a graduate student at APUS. The only thing that I really liked about the college was the professors, I thought they were really good. But there are a lot of other things that I didn't like some of them were big and business related, and some of them were academic related. The first academic related problem that I had is when I looked at my astronomy classes that I had to take to complete the program, One of the classes was noted that it was no longer offered at the program! I believe that was the lunar geology class. So you would have to be given a new class to take to substitute for the lunar geology class. I talked to somebody about that a few days ago and they did have another class that they suggested to substitute for that class that would get my diploma. And I'm like why wouldn't they just put that on the class list? It didn't seem very well thought out to me. Another problem is that okay so the classes have prerequisites and one of the classes that I got myself into I didn't have any Cosmo chemistry. No cosmochemistry at all and I've read for a week and even the training Cosmo chemistry was beyond me. Now that's not that I'm completely stupid at chemistry I had advanced chemistry in college many years ago but that was a long time ago. And cosmochemistry is actually a specialty chemistry. I withdrew from the class and was told that getting a refund at a 100% was not going to happen for me because the one day late to withdraw or drop from the class was considered a withdrawal at 75% refund. The email said the class was too hard so that's not a reason to be able to withdraw from the class penalty free. But I really dispute that and that's because all of the other courses in the program that I've looked at have notes on the classes and the description saying you need this type of training for this class like algebra or statistics or something and that class had no warning. It's my belief if I have been an astronomy person at first that probably would have been okay because I would have already taken a beginner level of ,it but I came from a different type of academic background. So I think that they actually should have given me a penalty free withdrawal. Another thing that has been just horrible at that school is that I get hacked all over the place, that may not be the responsibility of that school, but they're technical support team is not really very good. When I talk to them on the phone about the hacks on my Microsoft word 365 account they said they had no idea about that didn't know anything at all, didn't even suggest that I try to change my password every week or something simple like that. They said that all that they do is the actual class itself that they can make changes to that. I had at least one class where somehow the rubric was messed up for one of my projects, and what I had to do is get somebody to send me their rubric so I would know what I was actually supposed to do. Like I said the idea that I get hacked doesn't really mean anything to them and they didn't report it, I had to report it to the FBI myself. And the FBI does know about the issue I have with hacker. But they should have at least been able to get my rubrics back up for that class. Now this is the worst problem: the scholarship money financially money whatever I had was all wrong. I got too much of one type of money, making me actually over the allowable limit. For two semesters I asked them if they were sure that that was the right amount that I was eligible to get. They said yes both of those semesters then I talked to nslds and they said no you should not have gotten that. So I'm kind of financially screwed. I can only imagine how that's going to play out over time. At this point I wonder if they get commissioned to get a student to go to their school? Is that a sales position commission-based? I mean they could up their game for creatively redirecting how they produce their programs. But the business games that they play and especially upsetting the amount of money that I got was just a vicious game to play with me! I don't know how ever straighten that out except to pay it all back and that's a lot of money at once. I decided to leave their school and their program because taken all together it's a lot of negatives and the pluses just weren't that big. I've decided that it wasn't a good place for me to go to school although I did meet some interesting people. If I had it to do all over again, I would have asked more people about their experiences. Mine there were problematic and I didn't believe investing more time and money was reasonable.