Student Experiences at Western Governors University (WGU)

This thread is intended for students to write about their experiences at Western Governors University.

Please keep it civil, and do not spend your time bashing the school, and its policies. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but if you have a problem you need to take it up with your professor or mentor. Please no Flaming on this thread.

You can ask for help with a referral (used to avoid paying the application fee) on the following thread: http://www.techexams.net/forums/jobs-degrees/55634-wgu-refer-friend-thread-those-seeking-referral.html

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Comments

Cherper

I worked in financial aid at a university for a while (I was doing web and database) and how it worked was the award package usually came in after school started, a week to ten days. The school was notified how much you were getting (in this case it was divided between the two semesters) and they credited your account with the funds, even though they hadn't been received. They did that partly to keep people from enrolling, getting the money and then dropping out with a big chunk of cash in hand. By waiting, they got past the drop with 100% refund date and so if you dropped out, you didn't see any cash.

If you were going to get more than your costs, you would need to wait for the money to arrive to get your check. Sucks if you needed to buy a laptop or something, but for books, you could get a voucher that allowed you to buy the books and put them on your student account, so that when your award package came in, it was just subtracted.

YMH

It's official, I am starting on July 1st.

erpadmin

earweed wrote: »

What book are you using for the Sec+ erpadmin?

CompTIA Security+: Get Certified Get Ahead: SY0-201 Study Guide by Darril Gibson (Kindle Edition).

Gets rave reviews here and at Amazon. He does an excellent job at breaking down the AC models. I definitely know them now but I still have more studying to do.

earweed

@erpadmin- good choice of book..it'll get you there

Are there any June starters here?

historian1974

I applied back in March to start in May on the MS in Infomation Security and Assurance. I passed the entrance assessment, provided all requested documents (i.e. resume and transcripts) and am still awaiting word if I have been accepted. I have tried several times since to contact my advisor, but never received a return call. Not sure where to go from here...maybe it just isn't meant to be.

earweed

You may want to contact WGU directly if your advisor is not getting back to you. WGU has some good advisor/mentors and some not so good. Your advisor should have gotten back to you by now. Even if they were not going to accept you (which if you got to the point of passing entrance assessment you should be accepted) they should have told you by now.

jtoast

Call student services at (866) 903-0110. They have been extremely helpful getting problems solved for me.

tomahawkeer

I started the process at WGU last month, and as of today, ive been accepted as a student, and the only thing outstanding currently for me, is awaiting my financial aid reward, which according to my ac, should show up within the next week (takes 2 to 3 weeks from the completion of the last form, today made 2 weeks) and im set to start July 1.

My councler has been extremely spot on with everything with me. If I have a question, I can either call him or email him, and he always gets back to me, most of the time the same day, if not first thing the very next day. He answered every question that I threw at him, and it was quite a bit especially when I was still trying to determine where I was going to go.

I must say im really surprised at some of the bad experiences that some of you have had, however im sure there are counclers that are not very good at what they do.

erpadmin

tomahawkeer wrote: »

I must say im really surprised at some of the bad experiences that some of you have had, however im sure there are counclers that are not very good at what they do.

I think the mentoring will be a different experience than the enrollment. That's what I gather, anyway. The mentors don't teach, as much as you do everything yourself (pretty much like a regular college....lmao).

Congrats on the starting. It is still my hope to do the same for August.

Thxlbx

Well, I have passed my assessment! I have also submitted my FAFSA application, and have sent in the transcript request forms. Hopefully it will all come together in the next couple of weeks so I can start July 1!

dwilliams2361

I just began on June 1st and finished the EWB2 on the 2nd. Just been enrolled in the WFV1 any advice on getting this knocked out within the next couple of weeks?

tomahawkeer

edit: Thats IT Fundamentals I right? CIW associates isn't much if you have any experience of working on computers.

earweed

dwilliams2361 wrote: »

I just began on June 1st and finished the EWB2 on the 2nd. Just been enrolled in the WFV1 any advice on getting this knocked out within the next couple of weeks?

Depends on your experience level. My experience was mostly PC hardware so I had to study for about 3 weeks. Take the preassessment to find your weak areas and work on those.
It's a very broad, not very deep, test you'll be taking. Most people who take it only have to study the html tags a little, but these are people who already have a few certs and experience.

YMH

Thxlbx wrote: »

Well, I have passed my assessment! I have also submitted my FAFSA application, and have sent in the transcript request forms. Hopefully it will all come together in the next couple of weeks so I can start July 1!

What is going to be your focus?

dwilliams2361

How many question are on the actual exam for your cert?

earweed

85 questions and 90 minutes. When I took it I had over a half hour to spare.

asurania

I am all registered for July 1 Start date for
BSIT Network Design and Management

Doing the two payment plan and made the first tution payment already

Intake Interview done, and just waiting for them to process my transfer credit. (I pretty much have an idea when i am getting credit for).

Just excited to start studying....feel like i am wasting my time watching TV or playing online games.... feel more productive studing

tomahawkeer

Got my transfer evaluation a little bit ago, and as expected, all my general ed, math english etc was all cleared by my AS. Ive now only got the core classes and the capstone stuff to get my BS. Its knuckle down time. Start date July 1!

jahsoul

*walks in angry*

Who here HATES Taskstream? A week and a half and I still don't have a score on a 5 paragraph essay.

*walks out angry and goes back to studying*

earweed

I remember the days of taskstream with the language arts class. That's why my class took so long to complete.
Hate it..YES

I'll still have 2 more opportunities to hate taskstream since the technical writing and capstone project both get completed through taskstream.

thenjduke

Well it is official. I start class on July 1, 2010.

veritas_libertas

thenjduke wrote: »

Well it is official. I start class on July 1, 2010.

Congratz!

earweed

<RANT>
Why can't my mentor do ANYTHING on the weekend. Otherwise she's really good.
I ordered my examforce last week, it never came, and they're still "supposed" to reorder it for me. Meanwhile my mentor suggested I could just do a measure up and she could refer me for the assessment based on those results. Doubtful as I can't even find answers to some of those questions that I remember in the textbook. Some of those measure up questions were from out in leftfield somewhere and to top it off there were 8 questions out of 30 dealing with file systems. file systems and printer systems combined is only 14% of the objectives.
I took this test Friday afternoon and since it's an assessment type test the results goto the mentor, I don't even know how I did on it yet. She has to email me the results and since I took it Friday afternoon the weekend steps in the way! I have to work monday (no study time) and I have 3 clients to see Tuesday for my side business of repairing HDTV's then work Wednesday.
Hopefully i did well enough for her to refer me for the assessment. I'll find out Monday.
</RANT>

thenjduke

Thanks I am looking forward to WGU. I was attending Devry and loved it there but feel I will learn more at WGU and the price is right.

earweed

thenjduke wrote: »

Well it is official. I start class on July 1, 2010.

An early welcome to WGU. Don't forget to check in at the techexams roll call thread in the IT Program community.
By the way, what's your emphasis?

earweed

I did really crappy on the measure up but my mentor approved me taking the test anyway. I'm still waiting on the examforce practice test. My mentor had WGU reorder it but it's still not here. My only weak areas in the test were print and file services and the section on IP Addressing so I'm reviewing those areas. Aced the sections on network access and name resolution.

petedude

earweed wrote: »

I did really crappy on the measure up but my mentor approved me taking the test anyway. I'm still waiting on the examforce practice test. My mentor had WGU reorder it but it's still not here. My only weak areas in the test were print and file services and the section on IP Addressing so I'm reviewing those areas. Aced the sections on network access and name resolution.

Is that for the 642?

earweed

petedude wrote: »

Is that for the 642?

Yes, forgot to mention that. That measure up test had some questions on it I couldn't even find in the MS Press book. The questions that really stumped me I copy/pasted to one note (I was surprised this worked) and tried to find answers for after I was done with the test.

EDIT: I finally got my examforce. For some reason the new gmail is not letting mail get to me from exam force..this time they cc'd my mentor and she forwarded the email to me. No spam filter and the junk email box is empty. I took the pretest and had 83 - 85% on every area but file/print systems, 33% in that area. The MS Press book is so thin on covering that area.

Hyper-Me

I passed CLC1 on saturday with an 80%. Never studied, never cracked a book. Joke of a class.

Im also enrolled in INT1 (science lab) and i was dreading actually putting together a powerpoint of information on a topic. I didnt feel like it was hard, but people in the communities were saying that theyre work got nitpicked to death.

So i submitted some very very underpar work this afternoon thinking that I would see where they scored me low and just fix it.

To my astonishment it was graded within an hour with a perfect score and a comment of "Good job!".

*facepalm*

earweed

The big thing about taskstream is that you're graded more on presentation than on content. For the papers it's about the formatting and using good grammar. For your power point it was probably graded like that because you put together the presentation really well.
As for it getting graded in an hour that's what's amazing, they usually take forever to get anything graded. It doesn't take them long to actually grade something just a long time to get to it.
Congrats on getting the CLC1 done