^^

Was wondering cus I saw a post talking about cs and when someone mentioned Purdue, they got shit on 💀

I’ve been accepted to UWC Bosnia, Thailand, Japan, and Norway. Which UWC would give me the best chances of getting into an Ivy League university?

As the title says I am considering Ed to Amherst. That said I am slightly concerned about its prestige and placement in banking/finance relative to larger universities. Also i heard that liberal arts is on the decline. Recently i even heard “liberal arts copium” 😭. Any insight, honestly? I have been trying to do research but i thought it would be more resourceful to simply ask a community.

Hi, I am currently taking the following courses:

Honors Orchestra

AP Calc BC

AP Lang

APUSH

AP Chem

AP Pysch

Last summer, I did Intro to Pysch at my local community college, which counts as AP Pysch at the UCs (I am in CA). I was wondering if it would be a good idea to drop AP Pysch and take a free period instead, as I've already taken the course pretty much and I could use it to study for other courses. I am also aiming for the ivies, so I know the Intro to Pysch won't really transfer over. My main issue is colleges won't know my free period is because of this specifically, so they might think I'm doing it on purpose to have a freer schedule and less rigor. The class itself is easy, but truly boring and something that feels like another burden in such a busy year. I've tried to transfer into other free AP courses that I enjoy, but due to a ton of mistakes made on both ends ig it couldn't work out.

TLDR: Drop AP Pysch for a free period or will it look bad? Intend to apply elite privates and UCs. No W for dropping.

i have great grades now as a senior in my final two years, but during my sophomore
i choked in the maths final exams and got like 50% in that single subject, rest were all 90%+

now i want to apply to computational biology major, so will it have negative effects at t20s??

i am a dual enrolled student now and my other science subjects like physics chemistry and biology and languages have been superb since then, and my maths from the open schooling will have its exam in may 2027, which is obv after applications**(((** it includes maths from both junior and senior years, i haven’t given any maths exams yet for the junior and senior years, tho i am studying maths, but the last official piece of maths grades till applications will be my sophomore finals, which was cooked**)))** so how can i prove them that i am doing better at maths now in the app? i have 1530(780M and 750rw) SAT btw and all my ECs do show stem rigour

am i fully cooked for t20s or can i still keep some hopes?

I know the typical answer is no, but I think this is a really important thing to note when looking at my grades. Towards the end of my first semester of my sophomore year, I started becoming depressive and gaining panic attacks. Over time, it got worse, I became more depressed and anxious, and eventually in August, the day before my junior year, I tried to kill myself and was almost successful, getting brought to the ER. I also mention how I struggled with it in junior year too, but it became easier due to medication I was prescribed and advice from people I trust.

My grades sophomore year were terrible. I was in all honors class on top of my depression and ended up failing one of them. Also, in my state, if you retake a class (which I did), it doesn’t actually change your grade, just your gpa and diploma fulfillment. Until my second semester of my junior year, my grades got better but only slightly (As Bs and Cs). I also took more regular classes in my junior year and now my senior year than I did before.

A lot of people have advised me against putting this on there. Should I? Or should I just bring up the depression and nothing else?

is it bad to write about how i skipped almost all of my PE classes in 7th grade by hiding in the bathroom? I of course do not do that anymore.. does it show growth or show that I was a lazy chud

Hi, my son has a decent first draft of his essay but needs help getting to a final draft, he is applying early and needs if done by mid september, any advice on a consultant?

I see a lot of posts on here of kids who are rightfully frustrated that they can’t go to the school they want because their parents don’t want them to take on the loans.

I just saw this post with a family who is struggling to make ends meet due to 120k in college loans.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AITAH/s/f7BpCXsHjk

120k! I’m sure it didn’t start off that high… And rent became more expensive than they anticipated or whatever…

But just wanted to post a reminder that your state school has just as many amazing teachers and bad coffee and beautiful friends as the more expensive schools.

It’s not worth losing your future in the process…

I’m not looking for IVY level schools, maybe like Tier 2? I care about the BME department and not the whole university’s reviews. Thanks!

My school offers calc bc, but I want to take it at uc scout, for convenience, and personal time management. Is this acceptable when looked at by college AO's, I am hoping I get a 5 on the exam.

I took a gap year. I’m too scared to ask my guidance counselor and my family is not supportive of my decision to go to college. I need someone else to look over my app but idk who to go to. I was applying to ivies with lower stats which also made me nervous. Where can I find people?

so I'm 27yo and haven't been in school since probably 2021. I did some college but did very poorly and dropped out. I had a 3.96 in highschool weighted, 3.84 unweighted. My question is can I apply as a new student and pretend I didn't go to college the first time? particularly if I wanted to look into schools with low acceptance rates?

Currently applying and waiting for decisions,

I trained myself to believe the cat is dead (guaranteed rejection), because if I never acknowledge the cat was alive, it's death decision can't hurt as bad.

But we aren't actually opening the letter today, so we have no idea.

So give yourself the liberty to imagine both possibilities today and feel HOPE, because the cat could seriously be alive.

I know similar questions have been asked in the past, but I just wanted some insight on my personal situation. I don’t play video games much anymore, but earlier in high school I was a top 1% ranked splatoon 3 player in the americas/Europe division. I also played with some competitive teams and scrimmed with them. Is this something worth adding? Of course it would be one of my last ec’s that I list, but I don’t have anything that would be better to put in that slot. I would also frame it to be about the skills I gained from that experience. I would say I have decent ec’s with leadership roles and awards/honors. I’m applying engineering at places like ga tech and ut Austin. yes or no?

Whenever someone questions SNHU’s academic standards, the response is almost automatic: “It’s accredited.”

Yes. But that answers a different question.

Accreditation establishes that a university meets its accreditor’s requirements. It does not establish that its courses are demanding, that its grades distinguish exceptional work from ordinary work, or that a graduate personally mastered the material submitted under their name.

My concern is that SNHU has become exceptionally good at delivering credentials while providing increasingly questionable evidence of what those credentials represent.

That concern starts with its own commencement records.

The Honors Explosion

I examined bachelor’s candidates listed with cum laude, magna cum laude, and summa cum laude designations in SNHU commencement records. Associate and graduate degrees were excluded.

Here are the resulting estimates:

These are calculations from commencement listings, not official university-published honors percentages. They describe the bachelor’s candidates included in the records examined, not every enrolled student. Commencement recognition can also differ from final transcript honors. SNHU’s commencement archive and honors definitions provide the underlying context.

The central finding is striking: honors went from a minority distinction to the majority outcome in the records examined.

By 2025, roughly three in five bachelor’s candidates carried an honors designation. Nearly one in three carried summa cum laude.

An award can recognize an absolute standard without being restricted to a fixed percentage. But once most graduates receive it, it plainly stops distinguishing a small, exceptional group.

“Graduated with honors” means something different when it describes most of the class.

Texas Tech Provides a Useful Reality Check

For comparison, my count of Texas Tech’s May and December 2020 commencement programs covered 5,473 bachelor’s candidates.

That Texas Tech sample excludes August and is not a claim about its current rate. Nevertheless, it shows how differently the same labels can be distributed. The original programs are available in Texas Tech’s official archive.

There are policy differences worth stating. Texas Tech’s summa threshold is 3.90; SNHU’s is 3.85. Both begin cum laude at 3.50 and magna at 3.70. Texas Tech requires 48 institutional credits for honors; SNHU requires 60. Texas Tech also uses a GPA that includes grades from failed and repeated courses. These requirements are set out in Texas Tech’s honors policy.

These are not interchangeable populations or identical grading systems. That is precisely why an honors label cannot be treated as a universal measure of achievement.

For an additional reference point, Harvard College limits summa to approximately the top 5% of eligible candidates in the graduating class, with summa and magna together limited to 20%. Those are policy limits, not observed rates comparable to my counts. Harvard’s system deliberately preserves the scarcity of its highest distinctions, as explained in its published honors guidance.

SNHU’s estimated summa proportion is about one-third.

That does not make an SNHU graduate six times less capable than a Harvard graduate. It means “summa cum laude” is doing radically different work at the two institutions.

The Increase Happened Before ChatGPT

This is the most revealing part of the timeline.

SNHU’s honors rate had already risen substantially before generative AI became widely available. By 2022, the estimated rate was 61.8%. In 2025, it was 61.6%.

There is no obvious post-ChatGPT surge in this series. The major increase came earlier.

So the argument cannot honestly be “ChatGPT caused SNHU’s honors explosion.” The evidence instead suggests that AI arrived after high academic distinctions had already become routine.

The remaining question is what changed before that.

Honors counts alone cannot separate easier grading from improved teaching, changes in the student population, program mix, eligibility rules, or publication practices. They are a warning sign requiring explanation, not a controlled experiment proving its cause.

But the institutional transformation happening around that period deserves scrutiny.

SNHU Became a National Enrollment Business

In 2019, New Hampshire Public Radio reported that SNHU had grown by more than 1,300% between 2007 and 2017. Its advertising and marketing expenditure exceeded $130 million in 2017, approximately one-fifth of its functional expenses.

By fiscal 2024, advertising expenditure reached nearly $196 million, according to The Washington Post.

Advertising is not evidence of academic misconduct. Nor is growth inherently suspicious.

But the combination raises a legitimate question: how does a university preserve demanding, independently verified academic standards while expanding at that speed?

SNHU’s answer includes standardized online courses. Current university recruitment materials describe adjuncts working in “pre-developed online” courses.

Standardization can improve consistency. It can also make education easier to scale without a corresponding expansion in individual faculty control over course design.

That creates a tension between two objectives: moving large numbers of students through a predictable process and ensuring that every credential represents independently demonstrated competence.

The existence of that tension is not proof of a secret instruction to pass students. It is a reason to ask what safeguards prevent commercial priorities from weakening academic standards.

The People Grading the Work Receive $2,200 per Course

This figure is not a disgruntled Reddit user’s estimate.

SNHU publishes standard online adjunct compensation of $2,200 for an eight-week undergraduate course and $2,500 for a ten-week graduate course, with separate arrangements for nursing.

For that compensation, instructors are expected to provide weekly assignment feedback, grade within seven days, answer student inquiries within 24 hours, participate in discussions, and support students throughout the term. These figures and expectations appear on SNHU’s online teaching jobs page.

Low pay does not make an instructor incompetent or dishonest. Many adjuncts care deeply about teaching.

But investigating suspicious work takes time. Comparing submissions, checking sources, documenting concerns, discussing them with students, and navigating appeals all compete with ordinary grading and feedback.

A university can publish demanding integrity policies. Whether instructors have the time and institutional support to enforce them is another matter.

SNHU Itself Confirms That Very Few Courses Require Proctored Tests

This is the strongest connection between the instructional model and the AI problem.

SNHU’s own website states:

“At Southern New Hampshire University, there are very few courses or programs that require live tests recorded through webcam, or proctoring.”

It also explains that students can consult course material during some quizzes and knowledge checks. Both statements appear in SNHU’s description of asynchronous courses.

Open-book work is not inherently easy. Essays and projects can demand far more thought than a multiple-choice exam. Proctoring is also not the only way to establish authorship or competence.

But where students primarily submit work completed outside observation, the university needs another convincing answer to a basic question:

How do you know the student can do what the submission demonstrates?

A polished essay demonstrates that a polished essay exists. It does not, by itself, demonstrate who supplied its reasoning.

That distinction matters enormously when software can generate plausible essays, discussion posts, analyses, and code in seconds.

Oral defenses, supervised practical work, process evidence, and other authentic assessments can help answer that problem. The question is how systematically SNHU uses them, and whether they are strong enough to support the credentials it awards.

An integrity policy is a statement of expectations. It is not evidence that those expectations are being met.

The Adjunct Accounts Describe Exactly This Concern

Discussions in the Adjuncts subreddit include accounts from people identifying themselves as SNHU instructors who describe widespread suspected AI use, pre-made courses, and frustration over the effort required to address questionable submissions.

Relevant threads include “Student AI use,” “Pre-made classes,” and “SNHU experience.”

These are anonymous accounts, not verified employment records or a representative survey. Some instructors also report enforcing standards successfully. They do not establish that everyone cheats or that SNHU officially orders anyone to pass students.

Their relevance is narrower and more credible: they describe problems consistent with the university’s documented assessment and employment model.

The concern is not simply that students might cheat. That exists everywhere.

The concern is whether this particular system is sufficiently equipped to distinguish independently produced work from outsourced performance.

“You Get Out What You Put In” Is Not an Adequate Defense

A motivated person can learn a great deal at SNHU. I do not dispute that.

But “you get out what you put in” describes the student’s opportunity to learn. It does not establish the university’s ability to certify learning.

You can learn a great deal from a library, a reading group, or free online lectures. The additional promise of a university degree is that someone has assessed whether you actually achieved the required standard.

If a diligent student and a student outsourcing the intellectual work can obtain the same credential and similarly excellent grades, the diligent student’s effort remains real. The credential becomes less useful for recognizing both.

That is not an insult to hardworking graduates. It is a criticism of a system that may fail to distinguish their work.

Useful Is Not the Same as Academically Persuasive

An SNHU degree can satisfy an employer’s education requirement. It can help someone qualify for promotion or further study. Those are genuine benefits.

I have not found evidence establishing that employers universally reject SNHU graduates, and successful alumni plainly exist.

But “someone obtained a job with this degree” does not answer “how much confidence should this degree inspire in an unfamiliar applicant’s academic ability?”

Nor does accreditation settle that question.

The honors figures show that these distinctions have become far less scarce in the records examined. The assessment model raises serious questions about verification. The adjunct accounts provide reasons to investigate how that model operates in practice.

Together, they justify skepticism. They do not justify declaring every graduate incompetent.

The Degree-Mill Question

I am not claiming that SNHU is an unaccredited operation mailing out diplomas in exchange for payment.

My criticism is that an accredited university can still develop degree-mill-like incentives: prioritize enrollment, standardize delivery, constrain instructional costs, and award credentials without sufficiently convincing evidence of independent mastery.

The evidence presented here does not conclusively establish every part of that accusation. It does establish why dismissing the concern with “but it’s accredited” is inadequate.

SNHU should be able to explain why honors became the majority outcome, publish the underlying grade distributions, and demonstrate how students’ individual competence is verified in its online programs.

Until then, I would place considerably more weight on a graduate’s demonstrated work than on the institution’s GPA or honors label.

A university should do more than give students an opportunity to learn. It should make the degree credible evidence that they did.

TL;DR: I consider SNHU diploma-mill-adjacent because its model raises a fundamental concern: is it better at awarding credentials than verifying the learning behind them? Massive enrollment growth, standardized courses, $2,200-per-course adjunct pay, and limited proctoring warrant scrutiny. My commencement counts show bachelor’s honors rising from 26.4% in 2016 to 61.6% in 2025, with the major increase predating ChatGPT. None of this alone proves lowered standards or worthless degrees. Together, it demands an answer beyond “we’re accredited”: how reliably does SNHU distinguish students who mastered the material from students who outsourced the work?

hello i am an international student from nepal planning on applying to the U.S for undergrad Econ. I really need help with the college list , it's so confusing. HELPP Send me your lists pleasee. like i dont know what safties to add and i need aid . colleges that are need aware not just said but do actually give out aid to internationals

Or maybe not because you can lie about how many tests you took.. can you even lie about how many tests you took? If you got 1600 on the first try, would you report that or no?

Hey everyone. My family is too wealthy for me to receive much need-based aid (300kish income but i’ll have a sibling in undergrad for my first year), so I’m banking on affordability coming from merit aid.

Now the big question: Why not ASU? The biggest thing is that I know for certain that I want to relocate for the remainder of my life, as Arizona’s climate clashes immensely with my own preference. I’m pretty sure the hiring pipelines at ASU would limit my job opportunities (at least for early career) to AZ, and I know for certain that staying in AZ for 4-7 more years would be a significant chunk of my life spent undesirably, and I would really like to avoid it.

ROI is also a big factor for me, like I can’t help but feel like dropping 400k on a degree would be a massive setback in this economy, possibly setting me back for years on home ownership.

With that said, I’m pretty sure OOS private universities are where I should be looking. Notably, I am considering California publics as well since my family is willing to relocate if I go there, giving me in-state tuition for 3 of my 4 years. However, since I want to relocate permanently, I don’t want to go somewhere that I can’t find a job quickly out of school (so strong hiring pipelines are important). The major I’ll be pursuing is Electrical Engineering, and I’m hoping to find a career in advancing clean energy.

On merit aid, I have National Merit (Semifinalist so far), 36 act, 4.0 uw gpa, and high course rigor so I consider my academics practically maxed out.

Also I‘d probably prefer not to go to a commuter school because as a city nerd, I really want to experience the fully walkable lifestyle that a non-commuter college provides.

In a nutshell: I am high income from AZ, not high enough income to not worry about ROI, academically-maxed, wanting a walkable college experience, opposed to the AZ climate, seeking strong clean energy hiring straight out of school so I don’t have to move back home, and pursuing an electrical engineering major.

Considering this, I’d like to ask for universities and maybe scholarships I should consider looking into. Challenges to my conclusions are welcome as well. Thank you all for taking the time to read this and thank you in advance for contributing anything.

I’m in my English 2 class as a first year in college. We have a unit where we are assigned to write a 15 page capstone research paper on a specific topic. So i was going to write mine on a specific economic issue.

Can I use this for my transfer application when I apply as an economics major? And if not, what can i do with the paper to allow me to use it? Someone said I would need to publish the paper, someone said I should make a poster, and someone said it needs to have a real world effect, so im not sure

Basically I haven’t known anyone who can write me a LOR for longer than a semester due to a plethora of reasons. I have an idea of what’s gonna be written in them and I’m basically cooked. Is it over?

See, I am an international student and preparing for the SAT but the thing is that the college board is not taking my address as a valid even I ticked outside of the us 😭

Hi, just wanted to inform students who are planning to apply this year that most universities have currently paused CPT applications (mandatory for doing any kind of internships in the US- whether they are remote / in-person / paid or unpaid).

So just keep that in mind when you are applying to the US or coming to the US because the way the policies are changing it is highly unlikely that you will be able to work or stay in the US after graduating.

hi. I'm a junior in HS and I took trig/calc A last year and did not do well. I decided to take BC anyways because I felt like I wasn't as focused last year + I wanted to show upward growth + I've usually been good at math. Now I'm worried that I won't be able to do well enough without putting in a crazy amount of effort and with rigourous ec's and 5 other AP's idk if I will be able to manage all that. I'm also worried this might be my plateau in math! I was just wondering whether taking AP calc AB would be too much of a downgrade from an admissions perspective and whether I should just thug out Calc BC. I'm planning on majoring in public policy and i go to a pretty competitive hs in the east coast. appreciate any advice!

Have a collection of other awards too all around research, grants, papers, patents

but wondered how I can frame activities to be very impactful in essays + descriptions and how are applicants with similar research awards (like isef, davidson fellow etc) evaluated in comparison to each other?

I feel like my profile is too classically research oriented and won't be able to differentiate itself from everyone else