Quote:Resigned DETC Accreditation
The American Public University System (American Military University and American Public University), Charles Town, WV, resigned its DETC accreditation as of April 30, 2012.

Quote:American Military University AMU Degree mill - setting the bar low
Submitted: Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Last posting: Saturday, March 19, 2011

AMU is a rip off when it comes to quality of education. If you are considering this for profit university please consider the following experiences and be critical with endorsements of current or previous students, their comments and recommendations are bias. I would defend this university too if I have invested time and effort towards a degree with them.

First of all I'm not a student of AMU, because for profit universities have an interest not for quality of education but rather profits. My sources come from many military students currently attending this university.

All my friends taking classes with this university laugh at how easy it is to get a degree. Basically if you put some minimal time, minimal effort and a ton of money you will eventually get a degree. Classes are about 8 weeks long, with very few being 16 weeks long. My friend takes 3 classes per 8 week period with no effort at all. At this rate anyone can have a 4 year degree in a little over 2 years. But my friend will be done way before that since he got a ton of questionable credits for being in the military.

The curriculum is a joke. The main part of the curriculum is based on on-line discussion between a bunch of students who try to answer one or two selected questions posted by the instructor. The questions are extremely easy but most of the time the conversation turns to an off-topic conversation. The instructors hardly instruct. The five people I have asked all taking different classes with different instructors told me about the indifference and lack of participation of the instructors. They are there just to post and grade assignments.

True some of the instructors are probably experienced people in their fields working full times. They don't have the time to be full time teachers like real universities. They are there for the easy paycheck not the passion to teach.

The books are free but most of the time they are not complete versions just excerpts. At the end of the semester you turn around and sell the book back to them, so in essence the price of the book is included in the HIGH tuition.

Some classes usually require a paper to write. Since instructors are not really there to teach, they leave it up to the students to pick a subject. One of my friends, submits the same paper for every class every semester. He is getting by and will get a degree and only had to write one paper. I took a look at his paper and I can only describe it as mediocre with grammar, and style errors. He gets an "A" every time so I know his paper don't get read. By the way he is a senior in AMU and don't even know how to reference a paper using APA or MLA!

Their quizzes and tests are all open book. There are not proctored tests. So why even bother with a test? if you have to look all the answers. They are not testing your knowledge gained but rather how fast can you look up information in a book. As a result none of the people I know who is enrolled in AMU even reads their free book.

Back to the conferences, my friends use Wikipedia and the web to answer their online discussions. They just cut and paste and maybe change a few words and pass it as their own.

The sad part about this, is that my friends honestly believe they are getting a good education. One of my friends was took an economics course, I quizzed him some basic principles and had no idea what I was talking about.

If you just want an easy degree, with little work then AMU or other for profits are for you. If you want a good education then seek a non for profit or a real university. There was an article in the news not long ago, where job recruiters admitted they don't hire people with for profit university's degrees for mid level management positions.

Quote:This week you read two authors who discussed reforming the way we "do" intelligence analysis.

Please do the following:

1. Reply to the post.

2. Assess the arguments of each other and explain why you agree or disagree.

3. Answer the following question. Drawing on your own personal experience analyzing problems, do beleive that all "good" analysts need to behave the way the authors say they do? Why or why not?

4. Reply to the posts of two of your classmates.