Straighterline Tests

[cameronbroadhurst]

Hello,

I am looking into doing some Straighterline courses, and I was wondering what the difficulty level was per course. I am thinking about taking more than one course per month, but I did not want to over do it.

Specific Questions:

What is the difficulty level for Straighterline course?
What is the work load for each course?
How many courses would be an 'okay' amount to take per month?

[mog538]

The difficulty level is going to vary so much on your background knowledge in the areas you are taking courses so I couldn't possibly guess at that for you.

The workload can vary a lot - some courses only have a few graded assessments and a final exam whereas others can have 20 or more quizzes. I found Microeconomics and Anatomy & Physiology I and II to be the most time consuming.

That being said, by tomorrow I will have managed to complete 17 courses in less than 6 weeks (however that is all I am having to do just now - no worrying about kids or a job alongside finding time to study!)

[Photog]

The courses I have taken so far:

Cultural Anthropology and Religion. I found both interesting and completed them together in about a week.

Philosophy took about five days. I enjoyed this intro course and the book was an interesting read.

Biology took about a four days to get through. I already knew the majority of the material.

Environmental Science took about a week. I enjoyed most of the book, but it started to become tedious near the end.

English Comp I has taken me the longest so far. I don't have good writing skills, so I am taking my time to learn as much as possible and putting a lot of effort into each paper. It's taken me three weeks to reach the final paper.

I always read the entire book for the course and try to get high grades. I work full time and squeeze hours in on an evening and on a weekend.
If you work full time then maybe 3-4 courses a month is comfortable depending on your background.

You can purchase one course at a time, so just finish one and move onto the next.
I chose the year subscription and ten course package, so I can finish the ten courses and then purchase more as I need them. I have given myself a year to complete 20+ SL courses.

[benjenkinsv95]

Calculus II is a course you would not want to take from Straighterline. This is the only Straighterline course I've taken so I'll just explain my experience with it here.

There is a fair bit of work, I've been spending 8-10 hours a day for about 10 days and have made it through about half of the material. So I expect this single course alone, without doing any other course or working to take up a good 20 days of my time.

The difficulty of any given problem is pretty easy assuming you have a good knowledge of Calculus I because the course has amazing videos through Thinkwell. But you are not provided a text book and the tests expect you to do the problems at a rate of 1 problem every 3 minutes... which is extremely difficult because of all the work that goes into any particular answer. This is by far the hardest course, just because of the course's exams, that I've taken to date and is the last course of my BA degree.

[bricabrac]

Calculus II is a course you would not want to take from Straighterline. This is the only Straighterline course I've taken so I'll just explain my experience with it here.

There is a fair bit of work, I've been spending 8-10 hours a day for about 10 days and have made it through about half of the material. So I expect this single course alone, without doing any other course or working to take up a good 20 days of my time.

The difficulty of any given problem is pretty easy assuming you have a good knowledge of Calculus I because the course has amazing videos through Thinkwell. But you are not provided a text book and the tests expect you to do the problems at a rate of 1 problem every 3 minutes... which is extremely difficult because of all the work that goes into any particular answer. This is by far the hardest course, just because of the course's exams, that I've taken to date and is the last course of my BA degree.

I wanted to add to this post that although the Calculus I course does not have a recommended textbook, Calculus II lists 4 (textbooks list). Unfortunately, these resources are difficult to locate on the Straighterline website.

Students may choose between four (4) textbooks which all correspond to General Calculus II:
Larson, R., Hostetler, R. P., and Edwards, B. Calculus, 8th edition, Brooks Cole, 2005. ISBN: 9780618502981
Larson, R., Hostetler, R. P., and Edwards, B. Calculus – Early Transcendental Functions, 3rd edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003. ISBN: 9780618223077
Stewart, J. Calculus: Concepts & Contexts, 3rd Edition. Cengage Learning, 2004. ISBN: 9780534409869
Varberg, D., Purcell, E., and Rigdon, S. Calculus, 9th Edition. Prentice Hall, 2006. ISBN 9780131429246

[SuzanneD]

mog538, I know this an old post, I am just wondering what test you took and what your study methods were.

[scribbler]

Definitely recommend StraighterLine - We took 2 courses through them - Intro to Communications and Business Communications - and were able to complete both of those in one month. As others have said, the level depends on the course... Business Com had 3 required written projects, so we finished that in roughly 3wks.

Hope that helps!