- A live human proctor watches your screen and webcam the whole time.
- You need to show a 360 degree view of your room, walls, ceiling, table, floor, ears, scratch paper, etc.
- You must use an external webcam elevated on a stand that can see both you and your screen at all times.
- You must show your face and your passport or ID card before each exam.
- You can’t talk, stand up, get out of view, or take a break during the exam.
Although I’m sure some people could find a way to cheat, they make it extremely difficult. I have taken over 30 online proctored exams from WGU, Study.com, Sophia.org, Saylor.org, TOEFL, and Georgia Tech’s OMSCS, and I can confidently say that WGU’s proctoring process was by far the strictest.
In 2022, the average cost to complete a 4-year bachelor’s degree in Canada (while living at home) is about 50,000 CAD.
Personally, the problem was time, not money. I couldn’t find a single university in Canada that would let me complete a bachelor’s degree online in less than 2 years, let alone 3 months. This is despite having 3-4 years of post-secondary education in the field (equivalent of an associate’s degree, plus a semester of university credits).
Now that remote learning is ubiquitous due to COVID-19, I suspect there might be more options for Canadians seeking accelerate their education.
For what it’s worth, many people reached out to me after reading the article to thank me for introducing them to the idea that they could earn their missing degree in less than 4 years and/or without student debt. Many of them are self-taught developers with decades of experience that can’t move up the corporate ladder, work abroad, or pursue graduate studies because they lack this important piece of paper.
I wish I didn't have to wait until Fall 2021 to start studying at OMSCS. If I prepared early enough, I probably would have been studying there already. I also wish the program could be accelerated, like at WGU. 2-3 years seems far compared to 3 months.
Given that we both finished the program in 3 months, I suspect that we have similar skill-level and study habits. Do you find courses at OMSCS to be as difficult as others claim? How much time do you study in a given week?
I didn't receive any scholarship at WGU. I didn't know they were so easy to get. How much was it, $500/term?
You might be able to cut your time/cost to graduate by half by earning credits on Study.com, Sophia.org, Saylor.org, StraighterLine.com and transferring them to a traditional university. I've seen universities allow up to 50-75% of a program's credits to be transferred in.
* The school targets students with previous experience, which transfer credits that have no influence on the GPA.
* The school uses technical certifications (e.g., Oracle Oracle Database SQL 1Z0-07) as a final assessment for some courses, which don't cleanly map to a GPA.
* The school doesn't grade project-based courses (PAs), and instead requires students to resubmit their project until 100% of the rubric is met.
It's basically pass/fail. They won't even show students their grade on final exams (although Chrome's DevTools can reveal them).
You're correct. The path I took is not without compromises:
- WGU is not ABET accredited.
- WGU is not as rigorous as other universities.
- WGU is not as prestigious as other universities.
- WGU gives all graduates the same 3.0 GPA.
I probably should point them out in my post.
That said, I still believe WGU was the right choice given my circumstances. I don't value these things enough to justify taking 12 to 16 times longer to graduate.
I've been tracking every minute of my time (to a 15-minute resolution) for the past 24 months using Google Calendar. It's part time-blocking, part time-tracking.
In green are events I created manually. In orange are predicted study sessions based on tracking data from ActivityWatch [1], which tracks my desktop, laptop, phone, and even my Chromecast usage. I get roughly 80% coverage with it, and 100% coverage with manual time tracking.
In fact, I built a "WGU Time Tracker" for my capstone project, which attempted to automatically classify my ActivityWatch data into study sessions using NLP, machine learning, and heuristics. I might write a post about it.
Slightly related: I've been looking for a distributed graph database (preferably a RDF triple-store) for weeks, and haven't been able to find anything promising.
What are your thoughts on Ethereum and DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations)? Do you believe they will lead to a new way to think about and distribute software? It kind of reminds me of the "fifth generation computer", with constraint/logic programming, smart contracts and smart agents.
Do you believe that the gap between consuming software and creating software will disappear at some point? That is, do you expect we will soon see some homoiconic software environment where the interface for using software is the same as the interface for creating it?
I feel like the current application paradigm cannot scale, and will only lead to further fragmentation. We all have 100+ different accounts, and 100+ different apps, none of which can interact with each other. Most people seem to think that AI will solve this, and make natural languages the main interface to AI, but I don't buy it. Speech seem so antiquated in comparison to what can be achieved through other senses (including sight and touch). How do you imagine humans will interact with future computer systems?
While studying at WGU, I also tracked 100% of my computer/phone/TV usage with ActivityWatch.
I wrote a paper showing that over 80% of my learning sessions could be accurately detected and classified from my computer usage logs:
https://miguelrochefort.com/Rochefort_2021_Academic_Time_Tra...