Bad Review for WGU: Dishonest, Incompetent, and Unreliable

[Merlin]

WGU is a university and awards RA college credits. They use a non-standard grading scheme which is pass/fail only, and will also not impact your total GPA. This can put you in a situation where a graduate program doesn't have enough graded RA credits to use for calculating a GPA in order to meet admission or program requirements.

That could be a bit of a misleading statement since it depends greatly on the destination college and where the balance of credits were taken if they didn't all originate from WGU.

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

In any case, luckily GPA and entrance exam scores are usually weighted lower than things like recommendations, the statement of purpose/personal statement, academic achievements, and CV according to graduate application reviewers. 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.

On the other hand, there is no way to offset the negatives of non-accredited courses. Particularly if those courses are core to a required degree or prerequisite courses to meet entrance requirements. This makes it harder for degrees from TESU to offer the same value to people who are seeking to pursue graduate degrees... particularly for those of us who are part of the 114 credit club.

The key takeaway is that if you want to get into a good grad school, you need to make sure at least half (the core and upper-division) of your credits are from an actual RA college or university and not from alt. credit providers. Ideally, you want graded credits to simplify things, but as long as you earn credits that come with a grade equivalency like with WGU, you should be fine.