UoPeople WASC Accredited 2/14/2025

[somethingdudesomething]

Hi everyone, just thought you'd be interested to know that three hours ago on LinkedIn, University of the People's official page announced the school has gained WASC accreditation. According to online sources, "WASC (Western Association of Schools and Colleges) Accreditation is a respected form of accreditation in the United States, particularly for institutions in the Western region. It is one of the six regional accrediting bodies recognized by the US Department of Education."  Interested to know what everyone thinks about this!

Sounds good.  Wish they'd change the name or DBA

Dude at my time there I wrote to literally everyone in the Uni about it and pretty much almost got banned from the Uni's reddit for how much I wanted the name to change. They are stuck with it, it's the founder vision kinda like "everyone can afford it", but a name like "University of Pasadena II (since Pasadena exists)) would have been fantastic.

[bluebooger]

> 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

[Ares]

There is no way I would ever get a degree from a school with such a bad name.

Reviews say "Horrible"...

1: Some instructors are lazy: they generate LJ feedback via chatGPT, there is no instructor graded stuff besides LJ on some courses. Comparative programming for example, we do not even have programming assignments to submit. All you do is write discussion forum entries, get graded by peers, and you grade other entries of which some are either purely written by chatGPT or its written is a very difficult to understand english. (I can literally see if its chatGPT generated from looking at it. Conclusion: While some instructors really invest their time, some literally do nothing.

2: Peer grading: What the ? You get graded by your peers, they might say "Good job, everything is perfect" and still give you 7/10 or 8/10 or even worse. A lot of peer submissions sometimes are incomplete. For example, the PA has 5 Questions, peers only provide 1 Answer. Or the answers are purely generated by chatGPT. You might think, what do I care? Well, this gets boring and demotivating. So, grading poor work is a pain in the [insert word], and being graded by some of the people is also tiring. Constructive feedback is always welcome.

3: Content and books: Some are 30 years old. Some books are are scans without without OCR (You can not ctrl + F and look, you pretty much have to read the hole chapter to find what you look for).

4: Website is so broken and slow. Even moodle is buggy too.

5: Sometimes things on Self Quizzes or Graded Quizzes are not even covered by course material. And sometimes, graded quiz questions and self quiz questions are not even related.

6: Did not get regional accreditation and might not get it for a long time, which makes the degree useless for immigration purposes.

How the hell does a school get RA accredited with "peer-grading"? Did they pay off the accreditation institution?

DF Moderator Review...

I am really unhappy here.

My instructor mentor said I am not to:
* Dock points for plagiarism.
* Dock points for blatant chatgpt [Insert Name Here].

I got in trouble for not responding 3 times. My mentor requires a response Monday, Wednesday, Friday to students. But, all my students posted on Thursday/Friday. But, because I didn't post on Monday & Wednesday to "respond" to students it doesn't count.

I am to coach all students on AI use and plagiarism when found. About 35 of my 42 students are doing this. This is a lot to communicate to back/forth and of course its denied. Even when I show them their coursehero or studocu document they copied/pasted directly.

The peer reviews are bad. Half the students are going through and marking every discussion board as 0. So now I have to go and "adjust" everything.

My mentor is bitching at me every day with 4-5 emails that are 10-15 paragraphs long with a fake degreemill PhD for not "doing enough".

I was told by my mentor I should put student papers into ChatGPT and let it grade so I can be faster.

Apparently, me, actually highlighting, leaving actual comments, and real feedback on essays, etc, is not acceptable to this university. The mentor suggested I copy/paste responses for similar work and not cater to individuals.

No wonder most grad schools don't take this degree anymore.

This school is a mess. A huge mess.

Since I am an IT Hiring manager for a billion dollar company I am officially rejecting all applicants with a "degree" from this school. This is a joke.

[NotJoeBiden]

Wow, so virtuous, anyways…

[Tomas]

IMHO: Most of the problems happen in early classes, by people who are not even students - one becomes a student after successfully finishing 2-4 classes, at least 2. They have measures against cheating and AI
There is no barrier to entry, people can study for free, from all cultures all over the world. That leads to all sorts of problems and frustrations.
And huge number of students, 100 times students = 100 times problems. And huge number of not well paid instructors, I guess there would be quite some fluctuation of instructor staff and subsequently occasional quality issues.

It is not UC Berkeley, but I would be surprised if quality of students in CS (that FINISHED - not those who tried to sneak in for free to try first few classes) was substantially different eg. from those at SNHU, TESU and similar....

I of course trust ashkir on what he wrote. Maybe he had bad mentor and should have reported the case.
My experience few months later (with a single class only) was different, instructors were deducting marks for plagiarism, I had one submission marked as plagiarized.
Instructor was nice but didn't waste time showing where I have plagiarized from (I didn't, didn't read on it anywhere, just pure mind stream on an obscure hobby topic) nor open to negotiating eventhough I have pointed where the problem likely was(sw config, after checking with other students). Also I have read on the forum about few who had their work marked as plagiarized, at that time.
There were no cases of blatant ChatGPT use in that class discussion (no idea about weekly submissions that only instructor could see), though with some I could feel they have used it partially.

[Ares]

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 

[TINASAM]

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.

Are you a student or an instructor, you keep saying your students and your classes.... If you teach there and this is how you feel then why on earth are you there?

[NotJoeBiden]

Lol, I never stated my opinion of them, but this post isn’t about me.

It is about a college with inexpensive tuition finally achieving Regional Accreditation. This is a big step to allowing accessible college education.

There are fair questions to be had about cheating and overall quality, but a few comments online isn’t enough to throw out the school as a fraud, especially since they have the highest level of university accreditation. These agencies do large and lengthy investigations to insure colleges and universities meet their standards. You even said in your comments the RA accreditors made them change the way they were doing things to decrease instances of cheating so that could meet their standards.

[Ares]

Are you a student or an instructor, you keep saying your students and your classes.... If you teach there and this is how you feel then why on earth are you there?

Neither and I have never said "my students" or "my classes". Those were clearly quoted.

[TINASAM]

gotcha just didn't put who was being quoted. I went back and looked.