Anyone take Study.com CS302 (System Analysis) lately?

[Merlin]

I finished the quizzes for this course when it appeared a while back but I didn't come back to do the final exam and assignment until just recently.

I've been somewhat disappointed in that whoever designed this course hasn't heard of a spellcheck or maybe English isn't their first language since I found a ton of errors in the course material and final exam. I'd hoped that they had fixed that in the last 6 months or so, but it seems to be exactly the same. In fact, I suspect I missed a few extra questions on the final exam due to just how bad some of the questions were worded (or re-worded) that just confused me to the point of guessing what they were asking.

Anyway, I'm trying to work through the two reports in the assignment and I'm a bit confused about what they are looking for. For example, I'm not sure if I should just be making stuff up for this since there is no way to work through these things interactively.

I'd like to compare notes with someone who has completed this to understand the approach taken to get a better handle on what they are looking for. If you've completed these and are willing to discuss, please let me know. This would probably be easiest to do via private message.

Thanks!

[mudball]

My son took this class, I was a little upset with him that he scored so bad on the final. Don't remember maybe high 40's. He received 70 plus on the practice final.
His first submission for the assignment he got 22/100. I was upset again until I looked at the assignment. The only way I could figure out how he could do it was by making a bunch of stuff up. It is not well explained. Finally, after his 3rd submission he just barely passed with 70% in the whole class.
The only thing I can suggest is to ask questions directly to the grader. I don't know if you can find out who it is ahead of time or not, but maybe after your first submission. Maybe with luck, you can pass the 1st time. It was the same person grading every time.

[Merlin]

My son took this class, I was a little upset with him that he scored so bad on the final. Don't remember maybe high 40's. He received 70 plus on the practice final.
His first submission for the assignment he got 22/100. I was upset again until I looked at the assignment. The only way I could figure out how he could do it was by making a bunch of stuff up. It is not well explained. Finally, after his 3rd submission he just barely passed with 70% in the whole class.
The only thing I can suggest is to ask questions directly to the grader. I don't know if you can find out who it is ahead of time or not, but maybe after your first submission. Maybe with luck, you can pass the 1st time. It was the same person grading every time.

Ouch. Well, the practice exams didn't really match well against the actual final exam so that doesn't surprise me. I scored a 97 on the practice exam and ended up in the low 80s on the proctored final. I'm normally a great exam taker and this is the lowest exam score I've received out of all my study.com courses so far. I'm sure I'd have done better if I could have better understood the questions. The course content and exams for this course need improving for sure.

I'm planning to send a note to Study.com to see if I can get more detail on how they expect the final papers to be done but I don't know if that will be useful. I usually get better results by asking folks on this forum.

[zzzz24]

Are these upper level CIS courses at SDC difficult for someone who doesn't have a CIS background?

[Merlin]

Are these upper level CIS courses at SDC difficult for someone who doesn't have a CIS background?

I think that probably varies by person. IMO, the material isn't that challenging if you've got a mind for technology. Particularly if you have prior experience working with software development and databases. There are technical terms to learn and understand how they can be applied to solve problems, but it's not complicated, just a lot of material to get through if you're not already familiar with it.

The larger issue is the problem with the presentation and wording of the course material and assignments which makes the overall process much more cumbersome than it should be.

[Merlin]

As an update, I've also submitted a ticket to Study.com to ask for clarification, but I am not expecting much to come from this.

I know there are a few folks here who have already completed this course who didn't manage to squeak in before they added the paper requirement. Hopefully one of you can provide some helpful feedback.

In the meantime, I completed the SDC Database Management course over the weekend. I found the course to be better designed than the Systems Analysis course but suffered from many of the same shortcomings in terms of mechanics and content issues. I also ran across several errors in the final exam that should probably be corrected. Even considering I have close to two decades of experience in database management and even operated as an in-house DBA for a while, I scored below a 90% on this final, even though going into it (and even coming out of it) I expected to get close to perfect. I assume I'll get 100% on the project so I should still end up with a mid 90's overall, but its annoying.

[camjenks]

My son took this class, I was a little upset with him that he scored so bad on the final. Don't remember maybe high 40's. He received 70 plus on the practice final.
His first submission for the assignment he got 22/100. I was upset again until I looked at the assignment. The only way I could figure out how he could do it was by making a bunch of stuff up. It is not well explained. Finally, after his 3rd submission he just barely passed with 70% in the whole class.
The only thing I can suggest is to ask questions directly to the grader. I don't know if you can find out who it is ahead of time or not, but maybe after your first submission. Maybe with luck, you can pass the 1st time. It was the same person grading every time.

I remember the reports. They were a little vague. The only way I got through it is because I work in IT and make those kind of reports in real life so I based it mostly on that and added in stuff from the course. I got an OK grade, but I wasn't really sure what they were looking for an the feedback showed that they had really specific grading criteria but you couldn't have known what they were looking for from the prompts. I liked the class and learned a lot, but the assignments were hard.

[Merlin]

I actually got a response from someone at SDC on this.

In their response, they mentioned that they are aware of the issues and admitted that the quality of this course is below their target. They also indicated that they were planning to review and make improvements over the coming weeks to clear up the issues in the content, final exam, and assignment details. So that is good for people who intend to take this course in the future.

However, they don't have the revised assignment details yet. The person who contacted me provided some additional tips on how the assignment should be graded, which will help a bit. However, he didn't have any examples to provide to explain how to structure the report and didn't offer any advice on how to determine things like technology requirements. So I could still use some assistance from anyone who has completed the assignment. An example would be ideal, but talking through stuff would be wonderful too.

At this point, I'm running out of time and starting to get worried. I may just throw something together to meet the minimum of the rubric and see how it goes since my capstone starts in just over 2 weeks and I still have 2 more courses to complete before then. I don't really need much to pass the course but I was hoping to at least do it properly.

[Merlin]

It turns out that the person who responded to me is the author of the assignment and he actually reads this forum, which I think is very cool. Hopefully, more of the content developers on these sites take the time to read comments on these forums since I know a lot of people will post here to discuss their issues with courses rather than submit them to the course providers.

Anyway, he sent me a second follow-up in reply to my last post which helps clarify things further. Between those two notes and comments from others here, I was able to figure out what they were looking for. Or at least, I was able to create my own approach for how to deal with this assignment. One of the big things that was interfering with my ability to move forward was the word count, as it is listed as 750-1000 words per report, or 1500-2000 words total. I was having a hard time reconciling what they were asking for within the constraints of those limits. Once he clarified that 750-1000 words were intended to be the minimum, with no specific maximum, that made a lot more sense to me.

All that taken together, I was able to churn out the two papers (collectively like 20 pages and closer to 5000 words, including diagrams and references) but it feels to me that it at least captures the point of the assignment. I had to make stuff up to fill in the gaps, but I approached this as a proposal that would be expanded upon later once a contract was approved, which allowed me to cut a few corners in terms of not going into technical details on hardware specifications, etc.

Overall, it feels like the assignment expects a lot more effort than most other study.com assignments, including the other UL CS course. Hopefully, that ends up getting scaled back to something more reasonable at some point in the future.

Anyway, it's done and since I only needed like 10% on the assignment to pass, I'm not too worried about the rest at this point. Hopefully this thread will help others who may be attempting this course before further clarifications are made.

[mudball]

Thank you, Merlin, for your updates on this class. It will give a heads up for people that need this class. It is a good class but for now, the final and assignments are an issue and are very frustrating. I'm glad they listen and work on issues. I am a huge fan of Study.com and this will be a super useful class for CS students when they make the needed adjustments.