A Serious Students Experience, Perspective, and Opinion
After reading many reviews of Baker College I thought I might by able to validate some of the claims made by other reviewers. Yes, the participation can be challenging, however, after reading why the participation rules are such, it is understandable and clearly expected. I have attended full time for a year and a half. I am a very serious student and hold a 3.8 GPA over the past 64 credits earned. I understand that many of the teaching staff seem far less than qualified and most will make at least one mistake on grading for each class taken at Baker. This requires one to scrutinize all work turned in and even the participation because they often mess up that grading as well. Each teacher will often apologize in response to email if you catch there mistakes but the odd thing is they all seem to respond with an incredible similarity amongst them. "I review 200+ posts each week, so mistakes are warranted". It's always the incredible workloads fault. The Baker offices are far less than helpful in almost any area, including financial aid. I noticed one review which stated they always respond within 24 hours. I can affirm this is not so. I have left just two messages during my time at Baker and never received a response pertaining to complaints of instructors. The lady handling the transcripts responded to my emails very promptly so I give that to them. There are no lectures, in fact, no material other than the course textbook and accompanying power-point slides mostly, and so those whom teach themselves well will accelerate well at Baker. The computer science program is far from challenging. In fact, I was required to take three courses that literally covered the exact same thing. Almost three grand to study conditional statements and loops. That consists of almost half of all the programming classes required for the degree. I was a fluent programmer before taking the courses and I so I cannot see how the degree would leave any student prepared for the work force. The Blackboard system is used for all Online activity and I receive five plus outage emails each week. The system lags so bad that it literally would take more than three times the amount of time to take a quiz than it would have if taken the quiz on paper because of the lag between posting answers and receiving the next question which was sometimes over two minutes in the last math class I took. Most quiz and test materials come straight from the textbooks chapter-ends and questions not from the text are often erroneous. This is an honest man's opinions based on my experiences with Baker College Online. I have heard that the brick-n-mortar campuses offer much better experiences, so please take that into consideration. Other Online colleges make use of much better technology and although I cannot speak to their college experiences, I would bet they beat Baker's out of the park based on the lack of professionalism I have noticed within the Baker College system. Baker does give me the impression they work hard to be successful, however, they with-out-at-doubt fail to consider the Online student as a whole and take no pride in being of service to students as far as I have noticed. My brother attended a separate Online school and his school's technology made me very jealous. For the record, Bakers teaching staff appears far less than qualified. I believe I was able to teach the instructor more than she taught me in a c++ class. I felt pity for the other students enough to post contributing materials each day and answer all of there questions because the instructor failed to do so herself. I am currently transferring to a local university to take advantage of course lectures and a more respectable curricula. Please be very cautious if considering Baker College Online. Class Selection Plenty of classes and electives, however, classes are not challenging and may leave students UN-knowledgeable even after receiving an A. I can attest to that. Teaching Quality Many seem to not understand what they are instructing students to learn. Most instructors after a year and a half, have made mistakes which they do recognize, correct, and apologize for. Financial Aid I think Baker is of average compared to what is expected. I guess. Accreditation However, I do not understand how they got the accreditation.
Simpert
USA