Arkansas State University — Attraction in Jonesboro

I agree with "Bray H." that the quality of instruction is poor at best. I am also in the online MPA, currently taking a "leadership" course with Darrell Phillips. He docks off points for typos, not ideas, and says it's "grad school."

So I wrote a stern e-mail to him that as a graduate instructor in hard sciences, ideas matter more than syntax (we're not talking egregrious errors we're literally talking about a 1500 word essay where there is 1 typo and you get docked a point off a 25 point assignment). Very petty and obnoxious to say the least.

The professor's response btw? This is "graduate school." Lol, first of MISTER (not doctor) Phillips. You're an MBA from some no name school. Secondly, your course on "leadership" is just busy work every week with "book reports" and discussions with narrow grading ranges meant to dock points off students for no real good reason. At these low calibre institutions, they are a bit too pompous and conceited.

The bothersome thing is that Mister Phillips is one of the "better" instructors here. Practically all of the other instructors teaching online MPA classes have even more busy work, unclear grading schemes, and disorganized classes.

My employer fortunately is footing the bill for this MPA and it's only $10,000. It's just a piece of paper, and you won't really gain anything valuable from the MPA besides the same old useless outdated crap that no one cares about outside of academia. It's not even a matter of academia, it's a matter that the courses are literally garbage, and teaching yourself outdated, crusty, and irrelevant modalities for credit.

There is certainly nothing you will get out of the MPA from here besides saying you've got it (which is why I'm doing it), and for career progression reasons if checking off you've got a degree matters more than what you learn and which I'm fine with.

So yeah, you get what you pay for, which is not a lot to begin with, so as long as you keep your expectations low, given a 5th rate institution, from a backwards state, but at a cheap price, you will be fine. That said, given the price of this degree, I don't see any other good options for a...

A-State has really gone downhill. My graduation ceremony was a joke. I worked for a long time to walk across the stage and it was a disaster. None of those I sat near had any confidence in the integrity of the organization.

I have waited nearly a YEAR to receive my diploma because the office staff is poorly coordinated. One will redirect you to the other in a cycle. It's like the left hand cannot determine what the right is doing in order to complete a very simple and miniscule task.

Also, they called me Samantha Lenth at my graduation when my name is clearly Savannah Daggett. Don't try contacting the dean or anyone in the dean's office for assistance, while I was a student I didn’t have anyone to contact for support. They couldn't care less about the students' quality of experience or their employees ability to perform their jobs. Their “pack” motto could use improvement because I didn’t see it.

Actions of multiple staff members are not in alignment with the mission statement of A-State or values those who claim to be committed to services they should be able to provide. It has turned into more of a papermill school... haha, it would be if I actually received my diploma, anyway.

Don't waste your money or time here! I wish someone had told me that. Offering Teams or Zoom calls would be nice so students could screen share to resolve technical problems. I couldn’t login to access course...

I made the decision to get my MPA through this program because I am a working adult and I had no desire to complete graduate school the traditional way after spending 4.5 years at a university for my undergrad studies. So far, it has been quite a rocky experience. I do not live in Arkansas and the ASU internet is horrible at best, I literally receive at least 2 emails per day about outages and the network being down. Obvisously with this curriculum being online, these network issues cause problems when trying to submit exams and homework. There are several professors that seem a bit pompous, most of them are "doctors" of some elaborate subject so they come off as if they are God's gift to man and don't really seem to care about the students and/or their success. However there are a rare few that are awesome. Some of the grading scales are a bit outlandish as well as there are several petty things some of the professors will deduct points for on assignments. I would definitely advise you to do your research on this school and this program before investing to far into the program. Yes it's a cheap masters program (less than $25K) and you can finish pretty quikly (within 1 1/2-2 years) but you know what they say...you get what you pay for. Just...