How fast (in how many days) can you realistically finish Sophia, etc. or WGU course?

[ss20ts]

I read every document in the course. I watch every single video.

This should vary with every course. Even in instances where the WGU material is needed, it may not be enough to pass, or a small portion of the material could be weighted more heavily. In those cases, outside material or study guides can focus your effort more efficiently.

People attempt it all the time and their work gets kicked back to them multiple times which causes further delays.

Getting your work kicked back is not necessarily a delay if you have something else to work on while you wait for evaluation. However, if you base your work on the requirements/rubric, it should minimize how many times your work gets returned. And it should only be returned multiple times for the parts specified by the original evaluator, so that further minimizes the possibility.

You are supposed to be learning something. If you already know the material that's one thing, but if it's all new to you and you just try to wing, chances are high that it won't go very well for you.

This is a question of goals versus requirements. WGU is the ultimate competency-based education, so putting in the absolute minimum effort to pass is all that's required. I had to study and learn for every course I completed at WGU, and in most cases I learned more than was needed. This was mostly for tests, as students are often required to complete a large amount of busywork to get approval for retesting, so overshooting is actually a time-saving strategy. It's a laudable goal to learn for the sake of improving yourself, although trusting the course material is not the best strategy for that either.

Whatever the goal, I recommend building your own curriculum for each course to meet that goal. If the course has been around for some time, then reddit will often have good information to help you strategize what will work best for you. If the course is newer, then more research may be needed. In any case, I would be reluctant to rely on only the course material.

In my program, there are several courses where you can only submit 1 task at a time and have to wait for the evaluation so if you get it sent back to you needing corrections multiple times, that's 3 days minimum each time you're sitting around with nothing to do. You cannot add another course. You can't move a course up. In my program, we have to go in course order and we can only have 1 course open at a time. Like I said, I'm in grad school so it's a bit different. 

I was just reading a thread on Facebook from someone in my program who is now struggling with one of the final courses before the Capstone because they didn't go through the course content. Several people commented that they didn't know where the material was covered and some didn't think it was ever covered. It was discussed in the first course in a 10 minute video. That 10 minute video turns out to be the key to the task in a course way in the future. By skipping material, many people did not know how to do this task or even where to look for info. And like many people no one reached out to the CI for clarification. I have no idea why people don't utilize the CI's. That's what they are there for! I haven't had one bite my head off. I've chatted with 3 so far and all have been extremely helpful. 

The whole point of college is to learn. That's no different at WGU or any CBE program. Yes, many people who enroll into CBE programs bring with them a great deal of knowledge from their work and life experience. They still learn something though. I have 20+ years of retail management and owning my own retail store. When I completed my BABA and my MBA, I already knew a great deal of info, yet I learned a great deal as well. Maybe most importantly, I learned a lot about myself which has been an interesting experience. Learning isn't all about being able to recite things you've learned. It's about putting it to use in some way.