Eastern University

[mcjon77]

good thing is you will have a quiz, discussion, and assignments to determine your overall grade vs just quizzes with Eastern. Eastern is starting to add assignments but they are still similar to quizzes because they use an automated system to grade.

I hate discussions                
they are absolutely useless              

go here                        
https://www.amu.apus.edu/course-schedule...?c=MATH220

scroll down to
CURRENT SYLLABI
and under that
Evaluation
click on the +
and read the nonsense about forum posting
"for a total altogether of 20% of the final grade."  

20% of the final grade !
for forum posts ? !
for a MATH class ? !

absolute garbage requirement

assignments would be ok, as long as they don't interfere with working as fast as you can
but some schools have the nonsense of "can't submit you're next assignment until your previous assignment has been graded"

My bachelor's is from APU so I totally understand. They had me totally turned off from discussions and that is why I looked for graduate schools that did not have it. But this is the deal, Eastern grade is only quizzes and those quizzes mark you wrong very often. If you don't catch the wrong answer and make the department aware of it then you will not get the point. This method led me to hours of wasted time with how the test was designed and on the edge of failing. Discussions are super annoying but also a very easy grade.

Just going to add some additional perspective, before anyone gets the wrong idea.  Eastern's automatic quiz grading may have caused eleverson problems, but I had absolutely no issues with it.

For the quizzes/exams that I took, the fill in the blank answers were either a number or a single word.  The software even has a spellcheck option for the words.  The only time (out of 10 exams) where I was concerned was with two questions, where I didn't know if they wanted the function name or the name followed by ().  Looking at how other questions were worded, I concluded that it was just the function name, and I was correct.

Here is the thing, even if I had been wrong, I would have seen which questions that I got wrong when I got the results.  If I needed to retest, I could keep the error in mind.  While I won't necessarily get the same questions (the tests are generated from a question bank), they have the same theme/format.

Next point, eleverson was in the VERY FIRST term of the very first semester.  This is  now the fourth term and things are constantly changing (which is good).  Based on feedback, the traditional 3rd course "Data Analytics in R"  now has assignments and a final project, in addition to exams.  In fact, exams only count for 40% of the grade.

I say on this to remind people that with all of these new Data Science/Analytics programs being created, read everything you can about them and pay special attention to the most recent info, because these programs often change rapidly over the first few semesters/years.