Edgewood College/UpGrad DBA; potentially $11,250

[armado]

Here's a quick update about the first class completion. 

UpGrad called a video meeting for Wednesday over concerns about uniform low grades for the first course. I was not super thrilled about my grade for this course and had concerns with how the assignment expectations were communicated, the marking, and the lack of drafts or opportunities for teacher input. My grade came in at a high B, which leaves me intelligible for the rewrite the call was about, but I attended it anyway. 

Apparently, I wasn't the only one who struggled with course one expectations. The TA who led the call didn't share the exact number of fails but implied it was fairly high. She went into much greater detail about the assignment expectations and even showed some samples (which a number of us had requested before). From the student comments, it sounds like a fair number of us struggled to visualize what they wanted and were frustrated about the lack of input on marking. The general mood from the students was "why was this not done before", which I agree. This information would have been invaluable. To be honest, this course should have come after the second course, which teaches the basics of academic writing.  

The voice chat in the call was fast and furious, so I didn't get a chance to share any thoughts, but a couple of text chats I dropped into the conversation never received a response. One was about why there isn't a draft process, and the other was about me asking if the TA is an Edgewood employee or from UpGrad.

The TA was a little tense and annoyed by the grades and felt that it should have been crystal clear on our end. She even said, "There are no excuses," at one point. The overall tone was very much a lecture as if she was talking to little kids. She may be an amazing researcher, but I'm not feeling her skills as an educator at this point. The whole thing rubbed me the wrong way.

I left the call feeling frustrated with the process and hoping things will improve. The next day, someone from UpGrad contacted me asking about getting student input, but I have yet to hear back from them. 

I'm still pretty optimistic about course #2 and taking the first course as a learning experience. The second course is structured to get you thinking about your dissertation while teaching about academic writing, and I got a pretty good idea for my final dissertation topic. I'm SO grateful for that, as I didn't know what I wanted to do, but having it take shape in my mind is a huge relief. 

Have a great day all!

S

Hope everything will be ok