Pet peeves on use of terminology

[sanantone]

I do too.  Perhaps that would be something for the accreditors to attend to but regardless of that, it's always good to read the glossary.

That's if a glossary of academic terms exists, which it oftentimes doesn't. When it does exist, they're usually not going to define "go at your own pace."

Yes, I wasn't speaking literally.  I meant that one should know the definitions of the terms as they are being used.  As you know, sometimes you have to dig a bit in order to develop that understanding.  As for the whole "go at your own pace" idea, my experience has been that "self-paced" typically mean "accelerated."  As someone who has sometimes wanted to slow things down I would say that's a misnomer.

Yeah, it means speed up or slow down. At Merrimack, they believe that the ability to take more or fewer credits makes their program special. You have to ask the program director to take more than the maximum credit limit, which is something that's already done at traditional colleges.

I don’t know anything about this college but I would say they probably “believe “ what makes them special is their student satisfaction. With a 75% graduation rate and a retention of 85% puts them in pretty good company.

Uh. I don't know what this has to do with what I said. I referred to their program -- as in their online "competency-based" master's programs. High undergraduate graduation rate or not, the fairly new graduate programs they call innovative (their word) are not much different in design from other online programs. Someone who is looking for a program in which they can take a break for a few weeks and not get zeroes or points taken off or someone who wants to complete a course in a month and be able to immediately take another could mistaken their uses of "competency-based" "move at your own pace" as meaning these are self-paced programs. 

There's not enough collected data for most of their graduate programs to determine anything really. There have been three graduates of their master's in computer science and two graduates of their master's in information sciences programs according to what the College Scorecard has now. The graduate engineering program has had 11 graduates. The accounting program has had 18 graduates. Whatever program they have that falls under management sciences and quantitative methods has had zero graduates.

They only offer one bachelor's degree online, which is also fairly new, so their graduation and retention rates almost entirely come from ground programs.