UoPeople WASC Accredited 2/14/2025

[ShotoJuku]

Play Nice Everyone…..

[somethingdudesomething]

> University of Pasadena II

I MUCH prefer university of the people

university of the people sounds like its free or low cost, open to everyone, gives everyone a chance to succeed

makes me think of "The New School" in new york city              
https://www.newschool.edu/



but University of Pasadena makes me think of some small private "university" that I'd see advertised on a bus stop  poster 
"Study at the University of Pasadena and earn your Associates in Phlebotomy in Just 9 Months ! Financial Aid Available !"

LOL

Honestly the name is not good, I have got 100% reactions on mentioning my uni name on this "... The People? huh? is it Chinese?" ..etc. I mean he could have went with so many other names, especially since it's an American university.
"UCPA" for example "University of Califnornia Pasadena".. etc anything really, but as an undegrad from there it's not really a good name (objectively speaking).

---

Wow, so virtuous, anyways…

I figured you would like UoPeople it has that Marxist ring to it.

Plagiarism is a serious issue at UoPeople

My entire class this term is full of cheaters. Be it discussion or written assignments. Students are submitting plagiarized work from questionable websites. It's not even poor APA citations. I emailed and messaged my instructor, but they aren’t doing anything to stop it. I politely told a student that copies everything from Course Hero every single time that their work wasn’t original but copied from Course Hero, verbatim. I did it so that students in the class would stop doing it, but instead of admitting it, they accused me of cheating (which isn’t true). Of course, I’m not worried as I didn’t copy anything but cited all my sources even for the ideas. I’m upset that I put effort and time into my work, but others just get decent grades by plagiarizing. I feel UoPeople isn’t doing enough to stop such students. It sets a very dangerous precedent for future students that genuinely work hard and UoPeople's reputation.

I agree. I have witnessed the same thing and contacted my instructor with the same results. They act like it's such a big deal, but then do nothing about flat out plagiarism. One person I graded didn't even include any reference at all or even state that they found it online and it was directly quoted from an easily found website online. A simple google search got me to the plagiarized content. The instructor told me to take off a few points for plagiarism for the assignment and then I got a bad grade for my peer assessment because of taking off the points lololol. I had to submit to the instructor for him to overturn. It's pretty ridiculous.

Plagiarism is rampant ("Clown College")

There seems to be an absurd amount of students copy-pasting content from ai-generated tools. It’s completely obvious and it is disgusting and saddening that it is being allowed.

To be fair, I am not bashing the use of ai. The official APA.org website has a guide on how to cite ChatGPT. [...]

The problem is no one is citing it even if it is allowed, therefore deliberately plagiarizing it and it is seen as okay.

If no one at UoPeople has a problem with this, I’ll have to spread the word somehow. Maybe a report to some higher authority will get their attention. I’m sick of it.

The University’s President has given a go-ahead to GenAI. That’s all he tweets about lately. The issue is students should be utilizing AI to understand material but they are completing the whole assignments with zero effort through ChatGPT. I just saw students who cannot even form proper replies turn into Einstein and Shakespeare in my classes today.

Sadly, I agree entirely with you. Although we are students and beneficiaries of the University being successful, the administration continuing to turn a blind eye to this plague makes us all look like complete fools at a clown college.

Plenty of people point out the typical “just focus on yourself” approach, but it’s horribly short-sighted and completely ignores the fact that it tangibly cheapens our own accomplishments. I can’t speak for other countries, but much of the social degradation in the U.S. stems from this same self-centered attitude. We should be able to take pride in our work and in the genuine contributions of our fellow classmates, not just glad to skirt unnoticed through a degree program tailored to liars.

This may sound harsh, but I’ll go ahead and say it: not everyone is entitled to a college degree. Many of our classmates should stay in the exact circumstances they currently are.

DF Moderator Followup...

Exactly. The RA accreditor told them they need to do a better job with their instructors, and get rid of peer reviews. At this point the university only cares about marketing in Arabic countries and is throwing everything at trying to grow the middle east market. Which is fine and all, but they're severely neglecting their original. [...]

Instructors have no control. We only have control over learning journals. But, everything else is peer graded. Thus, less than 10% of their grade is in reality controlled by the instructor. So if a student does amazing in learning journals, etc, but their peers are bad, it's hard to adjust their grade up. I have to give a detailed explanation why I override students. Then I get bitched at for overriding students. [...]

Yep! I have a state university on my resume now. I was like oh cool, I can give a few hours a week to UoP to help them. But, no, they expect full-time staff, at $450 for 2 months. This rate is more than minimum wage where most of their professors are from. But, they're trying to get American accreditation, but, they won't pay American rates and they're pushing away American and Western instructors. [...]

Exactly! It's $450 a month now. But, this is really competitive in South America and India. However, it isn't in the Western world. This is probably why a lot of their instructors are from India. However, my big issue with this isn't that, but they will cater to that market, and accept fake PhDs from diploma mills, etc. But, require Americans/Europeans to go through hoops etc to prove our accrediation, but, they accept University of My Mom's Backyard if you're from India. India has FANTASTIC schools don't get me wrong, but, some of those schools aren't legit. They're even worse than ENEB or places you just pay for a dissertation, that not even any accreditors will give NA status to. [...]

They allow people who chat GPT all the assignments to get a degree and then hire them to do chatGPT responses LOL 

It's kinda complicated over there in general, first of all most instructors are "almost-free" volunteers, you have two tiers (I looked up every instructor on linkedin):
A) the OECD countries ones, these are just doing it to help the uni's mission, in my experience you never see them for more than 1 or 2 courses.
B) the non-OECD ones (I see the uni putting ads for them on linkedin), usually are doing it as a job or to pad their academic teaching CVs.
So in general the instructor experience there tends to be hit and miss, there is no "tenure" or someone famouse for teaching classes, I think for the 30+ courses there I got a different instructor for every class.
In the first few years GPT wasn't prominent neither by the students or the instructors, but in my last year it was exploding, I'm not sure what steps the university took to curb it before I graduated but I had instructors who their whole interactions with us, was through GPT. for example grading our learning journals. I actually took advantage of this and started asking GPT to grade my journal out of 10 and if the mark was less than 10 I would amend it until I get 10.xD

As for the material, for the most part actually imo they ahve fantastic books and materials, but one has to do the work themselves, their statistics, math and UL programming courses like AI and ML are very well designed and I still reference in teh books in my job. The issue is, as far as I have seen, since anyone can get in, about 90% of the classmates have no idea what they are doing, they are just coasting, plagiarizing, or just zombie mode. I'm talking about 3 years and 4 years submitting .java assignments still in docx ...etc, so in general imo anyone with a GPA of below 3.0 is sus.

However, I still think for the price, the school is an ABSOLUTE bargain, (especially if they keep it after RA), it literally changed my life and opened so many doors for me (which I think it is their original mission).

[Ares]

However, I still think for the price, the school is an ABSOLUTE bargain, (especially if they keep it after RA), it literally changed my life and opened so many doors for me (which I think it is their original mission).

How is it a bargain when you can get a degree from UMPI for $1700 which is an established well known school? I know which one I would rather have on my resume and it is not the commie named one.

[Heartstrings]

I taught at UoPeople for 1 term and then dropped the second term. I did it because I believed in their mission at first and still believe the college should be affordable. You get paid an honorarium for how many students are in your class and if they drop the honorarium goes down. I remember I started out with 40 students and it dropped down to 10. So the honorarium went down. The honorarium is small it is not a lot. For being a volunteer position they seriously micromanage you. You have to long in during a specified window and they watch and confront you if you don't. I dropped because of the micromanaging when I wasn't really getting paid. I don't really see how UoPeople can be a resume builder when they just got RA accreditation and also because UoPeople's model is built on peer-review. A lot of the other schools do not do that.

[xor]

I'm not sure regional accreditation makes much of a difference here. UoPeople's reputation online isn’t great, and there are other affordable options where plagiarism and cheating aren't rampant, instructors are actually present, and assignments are graded by qualified individuals rather than just peer-reviewed. In my experience, most peer reviews provide low-quality feedback from unqualified people who struggle to form coherent sentences.

From what I’ve seen, it’s pretty bad. I took a class to improve my skills but dropped it after experiencing the peer review process and lackluster learning environment. Even the exam proctoring is a joke - you can assign your own proctor from someone you know, and there's no real verification or university monitoring to prevent cheating. The proctoring is weaker than taking an online certification via Pearson VUE, where an actual human monitors your webcam and microphone. I was legitimately shocked when I received the email asking me to find my own proctor and provide their contact information. Since I was simply taking classes for self-improvement, I just filled in my own alternate email and a fake name before accepting the invitation there. It worked.

They really need to crack down on the rampant plagiarism, cheating, and stop using peer reviews as substitution for instructor grading if they want to be taken seriously.

I don't see the point of UoPeople for people in the US when options such as affordable community colleges and WGU exist. But I guess for people in foreign countries where local education options may be more limited, it might be worth it?

[Ares]

I taught at UoPeople for 1 term and then dropped the second term. I did it because I believed in their mission at first and still believe the college should be affordable. You get paid an honorarium for how many students are in your class and if they drop the honorarium goes down. I remember I started out with 40 students and it dropped down to 10. So the honorarium went down. The honorarium is small it is not a lot. For being a volunteer position they seriously micromanage you. You have to long in during a specified window and they watch and confront you if you don't. I dropped because of the micromanaging when I wasn't really getting paid. I don't really see how UoPeople can be a resume builder when they just got RA accreditation and also because UoPeople's model is built on peer-review. A lot of the other schools do not do that.

There is no way to maintain a quality educational experience when you pay lower than minimum wage, have to rely on third world instructors and then count on the good will of the instructors to volunteer their time. Sounds like a recipe for disaster. Something is very wrong with their RA accreditation acceptance. I wonder how many of the established schools who share the same accreditation feel about being compared to a school that graduates students based on the peer-review of potentially other D students. If I was one of those schools I would not be happy about it. Maybe we should ask them?

[NotJoeBiden]

There is no way to maintain a quality educational experience when you pay lower than minimum wage, have to rely on third world instructors and then count on the good will of the instructors to volunteer their time. Sounds like a recipe for disaster. Something is very wrong with their RA accreditation acceptance. I wonder how many of the established schools who share the same accreditation feel about being compared to a school that graduates students based on the peer-review of potentially other D students. If I was one of those schools I would not be happy about it. Maybe we should ask them?

Exactly. Many Universities currently use graduate students, post docs, and lecturers to teach classes and pay them equivalently less than minimum wage. It is completely unacceptable, but not a unique phenomenon. The US has normalized the exploitation of teachers.

[Tomas]

Are peer reviews really so big problem (besides most students annoyed by them)? I only did one class, no clue about rest. But peer reviews formed only small part of the final grade, so I didn't even bother asking professor to regrade low marks that were result of cultural differences (the well known 5/10 - great job, people from some countries simply have different cultural patterns engraved). Does the influence on the grade increase later on?
University of Texas I believe has or had peer reviews, there must be others as I have read these complaints elsewhere too.
There are RA universities that don't have any proctored exams.
BSc degree with 75% credits transferred is $1415 (less for those who enrolled earlier, they don't increase fees for old students). UMPI for $1700, not everybody can devote the time or has preexisting knowledge etc. to manage it in 1 term, also they don't have eg. CS degree (yet), not sure about others.

[ss20ts]

Well, I will be applying for the Master of Education program.. Is anyone else thinking of signing up for UOP now lol?

Nope. I'm still in shock that they were approved for RA given they don't have faculty. Their faculty are volunteers basically. They have an awful exam proctoring system. The peer review is just horrendous. Have WASC standards slipped? Or what happened here?

[Heartstrings]

Are peer reviews really so big problem (besides most students annoyed by them)? I only did one class, no clue about rest. But peer reviews formed only small part of the final grade, so I didn't even bother asking professor to regrade low marks that were result of cultural differences (the well known 5/10 - great job, people from some countries simply have different cultural patterns engraved). Does the influence on the grade increase later on?
University of Texas I believe has or had peer reviews, there must be others as I have read these complaints elsewhere too.
There are RA universities that don't have any proctored exams.
BSc degree with 75% credits transferred is $1415 (less for those who enrolled earlier, they don't increase fees for old students). UMPI for $1700, not everybody can devote the time or has preexisting knowledge etc. to manage it in 1 term, also they don't have eg. CS degree (yet), not sure about others.

I graduated from UT with my bachelor's degree and there was no peer review but I did go in person. With university jobs being so competitive I highly doubt UT is going to hire someone that taught at UoPeople when they have options. I know for awhile they were only accepting people in the top 10 in their class for their degree programs. So I am sure the professors have to have legit experience as well.