Bad Review for WGU: Dishonest, Incompetent, and Unreliable

[scorpion]

While it is true that WGU doesn't award a letter grade for each course, the WGU transcript does provide a letter grade equivalence.

You're conflating the academic transcript with the ROAT. The academic transcript lists pass/fail only and is what you'll be sending to a transferring institution.

This equivalence means courses taken at WGU will translate to at least a 3.0 GPA and may be accepted as higher depending on the destination school. There is no requirement that the destination school honor that equivalence, but in practice most, if not all, RA colleges will. So WGU credits will usually contribute to a transfer GPA at schools that calculate one. This can be seen from looking at the list of destination colleges that have accepted WGU graduates into their grad programs; that list includes some highly competitive schools with high GPA entry requirements.

Receiving institutions will accept WGU courses as RA credit, but they're under no obligation to follow WGU's self-professed standards for grade equivalencies. It would be a nice trick if a RA school could keep accreditation by issuing P/Fs and still force receiving institutions to treat them like "A"s.

Adding a big [citation needed] to the claim that WGU credits will be counted for GPA purposes. A quick browse through /r/wgu will show plenty of rejections from graduate programs due to low GPA, and removeddit/ceddit will show plenty more that have been scrubbed by the mods.

And claiming that based on a destination college list is, frankly, spun out of whole cloth. WGU graduates that also went on to selective graduate programs tells us nothing about WGU's role in that, since they could just as easily have prior or future college work that factored into it; you're saying that the grades don't matter because of holistic admissions processes on one hand, and on the other, trying to use the admission to holistic programs as justification that the grades do matter!

So even if a school looks at the WGU GPA in the lowest light, its courses are still considered valid to meet entrance requirements and any GPA deficit can be balanced in other areas.

This is not correct. Many programs have fairly ironclad tracks for course prerequisites, letter grades included. The Pitt CS program and UT Austin CS admissions come to mind. Attempting these with only WGU credits would fail to meet the GPA requirements and fail to meet the letter grade requirements (CR are not counted as satisfactory). Could you appeal it? Sure, maybe, but that applies to any student who doesn't meet a program's requirements.