Westwood College Online Denver Colorado Harassment Changes of Courses Deleting Post Denver Colorado

Jim,
As a former ex employee of WC, I can assure you that these students have a fair say in saying that this college is full of BS and nothing more. How does it feel to work for a greedy organization that craves money and getting hopeful students into unwanted debt? This so called "college" pushes reps. financial aid and advisors to keep students at all costs, otherwise your job is in jeopardy. In fact, I know for a fact that Westwood has recently been investigated for not compensating employees for over time hours. This college does not obey labor laws, nor do they CARE about students. I never have worked for such an unethical place as this joint, and really hope that one day this place gets "the boot" and gets shut down that they rightfully deserve. People deserve better from an educational institution, and hopefully more people will be aware by looking at this site and not enroll at Westwood.

Well I must say that is quite a laundry list. Let's see:

The reason you were contacted twice a day about financial aid was to try and keep you from being blocked from your classes and being dropped. If we had not tried to contact you so much you probably would have been blocked for not completing your financial aid, and you would have been on this sight complaining about that as I am sure. Financial aid is completed in Academic Years (not sure if you ever understould this or not) which means we are trying to make sure students are covered for an entire Academic Year (3 terms) at a time. If you wait to long to start paying down a balance you owe, or get a loan to cover it, the expected price will start taking into account the next term if it is part of the Academic Year, or if you owed for a previouos term and never had it coverd. Since you did not get a loan for your last term (I assuming you meant term, not semester) I am assuming you cancelled your loan at some point. Depedning on when this happened you can loose funds that we may have been expecting to come in, this can also change what you owed. We are not in charge of how much money you receive for loans. Also, we will not charge you for anything you didn't buy through the bookstore, or classes you did not attend. We give you an 'expected" cost becuase the amount of money spent can change depending on what books and software you might buy. So ultimately you would not have been charged the extra $1000, they just gave you that as the expected cost. If you had a loan for say, $2000, and we gave you an expected cost of $1700, but ultimately it only ended up costing $1500 we would either send the extra amount back to the loan provider, cut you a refund chack, or apply it to the next academic year, it all depends on the situation.

As far as working ahead it is not generally encouraged. Larger projects are generally able to be viewed at the beginning of the term though, and the syllabus also supplies a lot of info concerning assignements. If students work ahead it can become tough for the instructors to keep things straight as far as grading and which assignments have been turned in. I went to a large division one college and I can tell you I was never able to work ahead in those classes either, unless I contacted the instructor and made arraingements.

The tollkit is required in the sense that you will need what comes in it to complete your Degree Program, as well as hopefully give you materials to work on your portfolio outside of class. And you make it sound like you were sent a couple #2 pencils and 2 sheets of drafting paper. There are 56 individual components to the toolkit, and many of those come in multiples, and we do not ask you to pay out of pocket for this either. It goess to your student account and is covered by your Financial Aid (but you shose not to have any).

I have never heard a complaint about tests being in the wrong weeks, and I have been here for quite a while. Although not something I could fix, we are are always willing to contact someone regarding such a situation tot ry and find some resolution.

We have live tutoring, 24 hours in many situations, available to all our students. I have not really heard any complaints about that either, except for a couple situations where tutors were not available at the times that were listed. That was fixed quickly though at the time.

Also, I have yet to understand students upset because instructors won't just GIVE them the answer. Obviously you had not read through the book enough to know the material, otherwise the instructor would not have had to point out what page it was on. Youa re expected to do some leg work since it is college. Also, you cannot possibly be upset because a college graded you down on grammer and spelling. It's college my friend, you are expected to perform at a higher level. How would expect to get a job after college if you can't even spell or complete a sentence in a grammatically correct way? Westwood is not a trade school, it is a college. We are trying to prepare you for things after school. How would it look to an employer if they hire someone, and the first email thy get from them is not spelled correctly and full of grammatical errors?

The issue with the particualr tutor is definitely out of the norm, and should not have happened. But that is not the experience that most students I have spoken to have had.

With so many people acessing the server it does have to be worked on every now and then. Unfortuantely we do not have control of it. Ecollege is a platform that hosts our classes for us on their servers, so when they do maintance all we can do is try to warn students when it is about to happen. I have attended online class at a couple other schools as well and it is not uncommen at all for the servers to be taken down for certain periods of time in my experience.

I am not sure what you are talking about when you are discussing the posts being changed in the class. But anytime you run into an issue in class feel free to contact your student advisor. Even though you state that they don't care, even though I am sure they have probably tried their best to resolve any situation you have called them about. Advisors are not salesmen, and I can assure you that they are not paid like them either. They receive the same pay whether you stay or not, and are honestly trying to help you. But you seem the tye to complain to everyone rather then try and find a soultion to a problem you come across. But rest assured that student services, financial aid, and the education department at Westwood will continue to assist you in anyway possible, even though you decided to go online and blast the school you are currently attending about things that you yourself could have taken ownership over and found a solution to with our assistance.