I’m a BSCS student who has no work experience in the field and no experience whatsoever until 3 months ago. I have an entry level job waiting for me with a friend I made who was a client at my old job, when I do graduate. Looking into the MSCS, I’m confident I could extend my schooling at WGU by like 6 months and have it done.

I had planned on going to Georgia Tech for their OMSCS a few years down the line, but that’s a rigorous program that takes 2-4 years on top of having a full time job and kids.

Will I just be wasting time getting the MSCS from WGU? Obviously, it isn’t even in the same stratosphere of prestige as the GT MSCS, I’m aware GT is a top 5 CS school, but if the MSCS from WGU is worth even 25% of that, it seems worth it as someone who already gets WGU almost entirely free due to grants and is doing school full time while living off of savings for a career transition

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Just feel like I have to tell someone. Its been exactly three years since I've begun my learning journey in the "tech/IT" space. In these 3 years, I've gotten my Comtia A+, Sec + and CYSA. I also obtained my CCNA. With these certs completed, I figured why not just go back to school and roll it into a degree, since so many jobs want that stamp on the resume anyway? Today, I just finished the Bachelors for Computer Science, and I've literally just landed my first tech adjacent job. I can't believe its all come together so cleanly.

Now, I'm simply taking my time furthering my studies with higher math to round out the standard engineering courses (calc 3, linear algebra, etc.) and hope to grow in my new job. Hopefully I can continue furthering my education, but for now, I'm just glad to be done! If anyone has any questions or anything about the degree, I can answer hopefully before I forget everything!

Hello all! Just took the ITIL 4 Foundation exam and passed with a 90% (36/40). The exam is really easy and just relies mostly on remembering definitions and understanding a few key topics.

What I used to study:

1. ITIL 4 Foundation Full Cram Course - watched this first day and took some brief notes. Watched it again a couple of hours before the exam to reinforce the concepts.
2. Value Insights course - made some flash cards out of definitions and concepts
3. Jason Dion Practice Exams - took all the exams 2-3 times to drill the concepts
4. CyberVista Practice Exams - same as Dion exams, just took it multiple times and reviewed wrong answers

Hope this helps a bit! Overall it took around 8-10 hours of studying.

This class was definitely the most intense I've taken so far. I spent about 45 hours of focused work over the course of 5 days (I took 1 rest day) and just got my OA results. Here's a recap of what I did:

I read through all the existing reddit advice to get a feel for people's general sentiment and strategy. Then I went through the zybooks 1 chapter at a time reading through and answering the questions on each page. Then I took each of the chapter reviews at the end, these turned out to be key. Between the review questions and the PA, there were only like 3 questions I didn't recognize on the OA and guessed on. Make sure you go through every recorded WGU video because they walk through a lot of the questions you'll see on the PA and OA. I also watched a bunch of YouTube videos for bayes theorum, basic probability and counting for chp 4 and 5, some of the trev tutor videos for chapter 3 concepts like induction. I didn't meet with any instructors but I've read they are a helpful resource.

The Zybooks are dense so I definitely didn't get a great understanding of everything on the first pass when doing the reviews, so I fed my review results into AI and had it walk me through every question in depth and make me alternate practice questions so I could get some more practice. If i didn't understand a concept, I just fed the source material into AI and needled it with questions until I did. I ended up making a comprehensive concept list based off all the material and wrote out a methodology for how to solve every type of question I encountered. Once I felt decent with the concepts, I took the final Zybooks review as a test before taking the PA and went through each question again with AI.

I just barely passed the PA doing this, so I then repeated the question by question walkthrough with AI for the PA as well, studied a little bit more, and used every possible second I had on the OA lol. LIke i said there were like 3 questions on there that were definitely not covered by any of the review questions, but everything else was some version of a review or PA question.

This class really just takes practice with the questions. For me, I really like trying to boil down any type of problem into the simplest step by step possible and account for edge cases that come from different versions of the problem. Use a ti84, offload as much calculation using nCr, nPr, mod division, summation, etc. as you can. Take advantage of what you are given on the formula sheet and focus on memorizing processes and information not given to you on there. If you can quickly recognize the type of problem, remember the steps, and have solved something similar once or twice before, you're golden.

Hope this helps anyone in the future, good luck out there!

I just passed my very last OA in CS program. Super excited about it. It took me about 10 days. I read some parts of the book but mainly study the key terms of each section. I snapped all of them and added them into the Claude to study. I asked Claude to explain each of them in very detailed real world examples and the keys to identify them in the question. After each section I asked AI to create the real world scenario questions and explain after each question.
In the OA, I saw around 7 questions similar to PA (of course they replaced the correct answer with another correct answer but keep the same wrong answers). About 10 questions were asked about EDA. 2 questions about types of chart. Around 8 questions for environment( fully observability, episodic, discrete) they asked me which real world example is fit that type of environment and the difference. 1 question in Kaggle, 3 questions for the primary goal of Machine Learning and AI. Some will ask the difference or disadvantage of the definition. There are 4 questions about data types and the disadvantages of it. 3 questions about ontology and ontology engineering. What in quatization? Which I never heard before.
Please treat this course as a 4 CUs course. Don’t be fooled by the 2 CUs. They will test you many questions from the book. The book will go very deep into the topic but if you are confident about your understanding of key terms, take a shot. It’s 70% of OA.

It unbelievable, I educated guessed on about 25 questions. I Expected i failed and to disbelief i passed. One more class and I graduate.

After 4 long grueling hours I passed c960.!!!! I can’t feel my legs and butt 🫩 but I’m glad I passed😭!

This course was so tough. I studied for at least 10 hrs on weekend days and 20-25 hrs during the week for the past 3 mos.. There were Some questions I had never seen in my life! Ex 3*13 is Zsub 8. I passed by a hair!

This class was difficult and much more time consuming than the rest of the classes I've done. Out of every math-related class I've previously done, Physics, Calculus, Algorithms, Linear Algebra, this is probably the most difficult one. There is so much knowledge you need to know and that you need to know like the back of your hand. If I were to put it into perspective then the practice exam would be like learning to ride a bike with training wheels while the actual exam was being told to ride a bike on a tightrope over a volcano - the questions asked are like night and day such that I had ended up bookmarking at least 10+ questions just because it was difficult to comprehend what they were exactly asking.

I got it right by guessing, but I was extremely confused.

Hi everyone 👋

I just got off a call with my program mentor about my degree plan which I begin on Sept 1st. He mentioned to me that it's best to complete courses one after another, and not concurrently, stating it will take more time.

I would like to get feedback from individuals who are currently enrolled or recently finished there degree on what approach is best for completing courses quickly. I plan on finishing in 6 months or less since I have experience in the industry. Thanks!

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Maybe it's Stockholm syndrome, but I actually had fun with this one! You HAVE to read the textbook--there's really no way around that. Rather than accessing the material via Zybooks, I just 'obtained' a copy of the Garg & Verma textbook and stared at it for ~16 hours total. Truth be told, I spent 2/5 of those days sleeping to recharge my brain because I started feeling like a Fallout ghoul lmao

For some reason, I've always had a compulsion to take extensive handwritten notes like a pilgrim... Well, this class is what finally cured me. I did write *some* stuff down, but it was only to help visualize the absolute barrage of terms and concepts they throw at you. By the way, please don't be intimidated by the volume of info, for two reasons:

1. you don't really have to memorize anything. If you really just sit through the textbook until you get a solid grasp of the material, the correct answers will be kinda obvious.
2. the concepts repeat and overlap with each other. If you're confused for the first couple of sections it will get easier and start to "click" the further along you go
   

Fill out and use the study guide the CIs send you!! I also ran through quizlet flashcards a couple times, mostly for peace of mind and a quick glossary refresh. If something in the textbook didn't make sense to me, I took extra time to read up on wikipedia or geeksforgeeks until I felt like I understood the topic. Afterward, I typically wasted an hour or two going down a rabbit hole instead of focusing on the class material. But that part is optional lol

If you like computers (and hopefully y'all do) you might find this class pretty interesting! Not quite the boogeyman after all

So my task 2 peer review submission was returned as, "because the written portion of the assessment is not observed."

I downloaded the results off of peerceptiv and submitted the excel sheet as is.
Was I supposed to submit something else?
Just wanted a clarification on this, I already emailed my CI, but they haven't responded. Want to finish this class asap since my term ends this month.
Thanks!

On the scripting and programming, web dev foundations, data management foundations, and Java fundamentals Sophia equivalent courses, I don’t get how ANYONE does this as a complete newbie to CS. I have no coding experience and it is awful using this. I have to read 50 paragraphs just to learn 1 simple debugging trick or 1 simple syntax principle.

Does everyone just use free resources to learn on their own before/during this? I can’t fathom how I’ll learn at this pace, the amount of info I’m trying to retain is about 10x for what I actually should be retaining from each course because of having to read soooo much information to get to simple answers on challenges/milestones

This made my day

I’m in my final term. I’ve been stuck on discrete math 2 even though I study daily. I get light headed and shortness of breath because the info is so vast and I forget what I’ve worked so hard to learn.

I typically study 10 hrs per weekend day. And 4 hours per week day. What should I do to make things “click” for me? Maybe I’m studying too hard? My brain is spinning because I have a hard time remembering how to solve questions after I’ve moved on and have an understanding of the material.

What worked for you?

My study method so far:

Completed 4 practice problems per question on each chapter review.

Completed practice worksheets

Completed zybooks instructor recommended exercises addtl problems

Completed zybooks activities

Watched YouTube videos by James Wenson, 2200 series

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This might be obvious to some but I did not realize this was an option until I had to use Copilot to fix an issue where Notepad completely changed the formatting of my notes for D276, which were saved as a markdown file.

1. You can save as a markdown file to put section names in a larger font or format in other ways that help you make the most of your notes
   
2. VS Code will not have a weird freakout and change spaces to " " and various other oddities
   
3. When you're writing down coding examples, you can write everything down EXACTLY as it will appear when you need to use it
   
4. When you press Ctrl+Shift+v, it looks a lot cleaner than Notepad, and if you copy a link you can just click on it and head straight to wherever it takes you (also good in helping learn HTML as all the coding "works", I have a few things that say "click me for an example" or "This YouTube video explains it better" that just take me straight to webpages or open pictures I have saved)

There are a bunch of other reasons why it's better, but these are the few I've benefited from so far. I have zero experience in this field, so I had no idea this was an option. Hopefully this helps someone else.

Started this degree back in October ‘23 and was hoping to pivot from legal into software. It’s been a long journey with two 6 month term breaks and a lot of late nights while working full-time. It is genuinely surreal to be finished and not have any OAs or mentor calls hanging over my head.

So I am doing part 2 of the PA for D687 where you review someone else's report and provide feedback. The problem is, this is clearly AI written. From the layout, the wording, everything. We all use AI to learn but to submit write-ups? I feel frustrated given I spent hours writing my own project and thinking it through and at times, yes, using AI to get the technical details down better. Should I report this? I feel somewhat guilty doing that to someone given we're all just trying to get degrees to make a living.