WGU MBA-HM first impressions and ongoing comments

[dmjacobsen]

I have found that there are 2 ways to approach the WGU MBA. The "I want to learn and take the time to absorb the information" approach or the "I want a check in the box so I want to get it done as fast as possible" approach. The first approach you pretty much read the material take notes or use OneNote as one student suggested in the communities. The second approach you can pretty much google a lot of the information you need to satisfy the tasks (not actual papers, but topics in the tasks) and write your papers out accordingly. I personally am going with both approaches. On topics that I know a lot about already I use approach 2 and on topics I'm not strong on I use approach 1.

I do the same thing, which is one of the key benefits of the competency-based approach, as advertised by WGU -- learn what you need to learn, don't spend a lot of time on what you already know.

Unfortunately, I agree with your assessment on the writing of papers and the grading thereof. When I first started WGU for undergrad, I attempted to write papers in traditional essay format. I've always been a great paper writer and have never had a hard time cranking out papers, so long as I was knowledgeable on the topic. Once I started at WGU, my world was turned upside-down and my first several papers failed miserably. Since I was writing in traditional format, the graders weren't able to find the information they were looking for -- even though it was there -- resulting in a task returned for revision. Eventually, I learned to do the "rubric section as paragraph heading" format and have had much more success.