The official guide to self-study RA courses from ASU, BYU, UIdaho, etc.

[MNomadic]

Provider: ASU Earned Admissions
Course: CSE 110 - Programming for Everyone: Introduction to Programming
Course content: There are some videos at the beginning but it's mostly text + programming labs at ZyBooks.
Final exam format: 59 questions (proctored) + a final ZyBooks lab (unproctored)
Final exam content vs course content/practice exams: The proctored exam had a few minor curveballs due to my misreading the code samples but none of it was entirely unexpected.
Time taken on course: 15 weeks
Familiarity with subject before course: Some previous familiarity with Python (first half of the course & midterm), no familiarity with Java (second half & final).
Pitfalls, high points, things others should know: A lot of the content was for 2 weeks at a time. I think this was to allow people to be able to take their time to grasp the concepts but it just made things more difficult for me. I would go through the content for a given week in 1 or 2 days and then have nothing to do for 12 or 13 days. Because of this, I'd forget things that were learned the previous week and have to review them before continuing onward. The two lowest grades for the programming labs are dropped from your final grade, which is great because I got frustrated with the last lab (arrays in Java) because I'd forgotten how the previous week (classes & objects) worked and just didn't bother to finish it. Splitting up the programming labs and/or having more programming labs would've helped alleviate the problem of forgetting. That said, while it is required that you take the proctored final in order to receive a grade, this is a course where it is possible to pass (with a C) before you even take that test. After finishing the unproctored portion of the final, I had a 73% in the class. 
1-10 Difficulty level: 6
Final grade: A

I had a 99% going in to the last few assignments so I didn't even bother with the last 2 assignments since they would get dropped anyway. I was pretty worried about how that would impact my performance on the project portion of the final but was pleasantly surprised it didn't include any concepts from the last few weeks. 

I agree that the course structure didn't really work well for someone who finished their assignments in the first day or 2. Will be taking the proctored final tonight.