Free Winter term for Sophia members, Strayer U

[jch]

Does anyone else who enrolled in the free term have an account balance showing in their dashboard? It's showing the full cost of courses in my account. I reached out to my "coach" last week with no response. I submitted a support ticket about it a day or two ago and no response there either. I don't want to buy my course materials or even open my laptop until I know this is straightened out. Also, I just noticed my coach is now changed to someone else. I read about their lack of communication and switching coaches on Strayer's own message boards.

Did your admissions rep set you up correctly with the sophia free term offer? I explicitly discussed it with my rep, and there was a document for the free term offer included in the docusign package which confirmed that I was eligible and signed up.

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Okay, so I logged into iCampus. That is Strayer's learning management system. I used the pull-down menu under "Campus and Library" to find the following instructions about taking the challenge exams:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tNsQQZU...sp=sharing

Basically, if you've ever used ProctorU before, you already have an account there. You can use the one you have. Or, if you haven't used ProctorU, you can make a new account there. Once you login to your ProctorU account, you have to go into your own settings - I just clicked on my name at the top right - and I found the option to add a new school to my ProctorU account. I did this and added Strayer University.

Once I did this, I was able to just go to the normal ProctorU scheduling system and schedule an exam. It is actually a pretty impressive list of challenge exams and I decided to pick one that I thought would be easy. I picked the "College Algebra with Applications" exam. There was an immediate opening and I thought, what the hey, let's take it.

Everything was going great with the proctor until he tried to load the exam for me. Strayer apparently uses ALEKS for this test. The proctor pulled up the ALEKS page, entered the code that he was given by Strayer and it didn't work. Probably just a bad code, but it meant that I was not taking that exam tonight.

As a proof of concept, I don't think that there is much of anything stopping anyone who is now in Strayer's system from just taking all the exams. I would say that I think these exams will take some studying. I am planning to pick a couple that I don't really care about as test cases to see how these exams are structured.

Thanks for sharing your experience.

Regarding the bad exam access code, this is the same thing that I experience with TESU every time I have to use ProctorFU. It often takes them longer to get in to the exam than it does for me to take it.

For the Algebra exam, what was allowed for calculators and scratch paper? I have yet to find any documentation about this.

I am also looking to attempt many of the exams while I have access to Strayer's system. I'll first try a few that don't matter much to me, potentially as soon as this weekend. Once I pass something and it hits my transcript, I will immediately send it off to TESU for evaluation. I will let all of you know the outcome. If everything goes well, I hope to complete a collection of business and CIS credits that would be difficult and expensive to acquire elsewhere.

While I have my call with the dean tomorrow to select my actual classes, I'm having the same struggle with class enrollment as the rest of you. It seems that the system is trying to start me with the entry-level success type classes that I neither need nor want, despite having already completed nearly all gened through sophia and ASU already. Also not helping my planning are the marketing heavy class names and quarter-hour credits used by Strayer.

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Note: If you're NOT going for a degree at Strayer, these evaluation that they give you won't really matter. The main thing I am waiting on is "What courses are available to take for the FREE term?" I still have no list of courses to select from! Does anyone have a list yet? If it's some courses that I already have covered with the Alternative Credit providers (ACE), then it would be a "useless" term. I am mainly looking to see if I can get Upper Level and Challenge Exams for cheap... that's all I am looking at!

I briefly considered going for a degree with them, but then I found their punitive credit residency policy: http://studenthandbook.strayer.edu/en/St...equirement

Long story short, a Bachelors requires ~12 classes with them and an Associates ~6. Sophia, transfer credit, CLEP credits, DSST credits, any other ACE, and Challenge Exam credits do NOT count. No thanks, I'll stick with TESU. Strayer is too expensive to take that many credits, and there's still lots of alt credit opportunities that I want to use.