In Praise of SoBaT

[Ares]

SoBaT doesn't need any external body's accreditation. Its quality speaks for itself. Every student/graduate of SoBaT attests to its quality. There are a lot of so-called accredited educational institutions out there with low quality and standards! SoBaT thrives on"Let my work speak for itself".

Oh look the scammer comes to defend his scam school.

[auncollective]

My experience with SoBaT is as follows:

I took each exam without reading the texts, while I was preoccupied cleaning up my workplace. In a single day, I completed all of the exams for the M.S. Business and M.A. Social Sciences. I had to retake 2 exams but passed the others. I attended graduate school for social work but didn't finish, took some applied statistics courses through Penn State World Campus, took about a dozen business courses at undergrad and grad-level, and have a B.A. in Psychology with Anthropology and Math minors. My previous coursework definitely made this program easier.

However, the exam content is what you'd expect from community college courses. Definitely not anything even close to master's degree level. If someone just wanted to learn a broad overview of various social sciences disciplines or the basics of a few areas of business, it could have utility there. Associate of Arts and Associate of Science would be more fitting titles for these degrees.

[Ares]

What part of this is not a real school do people not understand?

[newdegree]

Has anyone tried getting the degree evaluated for US degree comparison?

[Ares]

I need to get involved in these scams they seem lucrative as no matter of evidence will deter people from getting a fake diploma.

[eLearner]

A free program is a scam now? LOL. Okay, let's step back from the ledge.

A person who would try to pass the credential off as something more than what it is would be a scammer, not the program offering the free credential and telling you straight up that they're not accredited. Sobat isn't doing anything nefarious.

If Validential gave them a positive evaluation, big deal. WES, IEE, and all the others have made evaluation mistakes. Welcome to the world of foreign credential evaluation, it happens.

[openair]

The program isn't exactly free. They're collecting money from every student, who desires the promised credential. At the current exchange rate, they are taking close to 200 dollars from each graduate. They are definitely making money here. It's not a form of charity.

Is it a scam? Not necessarily, but there are lots of legitimate questions that could be asked about an institution without a revealed address, or a clear authorization to grant degrees in a specific location. Are you generally okay with random individuals starting universities and granting degrees, just because they kind of feel like it might be a good thing to do? And what do you know about their faculty members? Are there any such members?

You said that "they're not accredited", and suggested that it's not a big deal for a credential evaluator (Validential) to make a mistake. It really is a problem, if they're in the business(!) of evaluation and can't tell what an accredited university is. As other threads reveal, this company has also "awarded accreditation" to Selinus University and similar type institutions. There'a history of "mistakes" here.

[eLearner]

None of that changes my points. The Sobat program is free. If you want certificates, you pay and it's entirely optional and up to the student. There is nothing wrong with this. It's no different in that sense than free programs offered by Coursera and other course outlets which are also not accredited.

And as for Validential, if we wanted to rag on mistakes we would be here until the next eclipse discussing all the blunders made by WES. As stated, it happens, and will keep happening because humans are behind these FCEs.

[openair]

None of that changes my points. The Sobat program is free. If you want certificates, you pay and it's entirely optional and up to the student. There is nothing wrong with this. It's no different in that sense than free programs offered by Coursera and other course outlets which are also not accredited.

And as for Validential, if we wanted to rag on mistakes we would be here until the next eclipse discussing all the blunders made by WES. As stated, it happens, and will keep happening because humans are behind these FCEs.

Yes, it's optional, but it's absolutely required if you want to get your degree diploma and transcript. 

WES makes all kinds of mistakes as do other NACES members. But their mistakes are not of the same calibre. They might take a credential that's at doctorate level and say that it's at Master's or things like that. I am not aware of them propping up unaccredited institutions like Validential does on a regular basis. Do you have examples of these types of mistakes, as in not knowing that an institution wasn't accredited in its host country?

[eLearner]

Most accredited schools in the United States require you to pay for your diploma and transcripts and that to me is a scam when you consider the high price you will have already paid to attend the school. If I've already paid $68,000, not only should I get those things at no charge for the rest of my life, but a school official should come to my house to cut the grass and wash my car twice a week.

I would say that whether the "calibre" is the same or not is subjective, but if I earned a Doctorate and WES deemed it a Master's based on completely ridiculous reasoning (which has happened with them), and I needed it to be a Doctorate to get a job, keep a job, or for immigration purposes, then this would be life-changing in an adverse way.

If you want to know about which schools WES has made mistakes with, just look into their database inside your WES account. Practically every school that they've blacklisted was given a favorable evaluation by them before and some of those schools were known to be questionable and some were definitely not accredited in their home countries.

There seems to be some strange leaning toward attacking Validential, and I guess them not being in NACES makes them an easy target, but all of the FCEs have made similar blunders.

I've said my piece on this one.