Sophia
Limited Transfer
www.sophia.org
Sophia is a business (not a college) that sells courses you can take at home for college credit. These courses transfer to partner colleges that accept ACE credit. (What is ACE?)
List of Partner Colleges
Sophia’s courses are video-lesson based, and used to be a little more expensive than some of their other ACE competitors, however, in August 2020, they changed their pricing structure to $79/month. Unfortunately, under this new price structure, you ARE under a time crunch to complete a course quickly. You can work on 2 courses at a time, but if you don’t get them finished inside of 1 month, you’ll have to keep paying until you do.
What you need to know about Sophia:
(1) No photo ID required. For teens that have a driver’s license or passport, this might not be a big deal, but if your teen doesn’t have an official identification card of some kind, getting past the ID checkpoint can be a pain. Sophia doesn’t require a photo ID, so no worries.
(2) No webcam proctoring. If you’ve taken other ACE courses, you know that webcam proctoring is an expected part of the final exam process. There are always concerns regarding privacy as well as providing a space that meets the proctor’s specifications (nothing on the walls, no one else in the room, etc.) so by using their new technology, they’ve eliminated web proctoring entirely. They are using a product called “keyboard biometrics” that identifies a person by their typing style. My son used it earlier this year and liked it a lot!
(3) Course platform is excellent. The appearance, style, visual attractiveness, and ease of use, intuitive style, etc. are constantly praised by our audience as being “their favorite” online course.
(4) All lower level. Their college credits will come in at 100 freshman and 200 sophomore level. To date they haven’t developed any upper level courses, but we hope they do!
(5) Responsiveness. Their customer service is excellent! In addition, they are in regular communication with HS4CC offering promotions, deals, and coupons exclusively to our audience, and we love deals!!
(6) No labs. At this time, none of their sciences offer lab credit. It wouldn’t hurt to send them an email asking for them to add a lab. A lot of colleges want lab sciences, and there are other ACE providers already serving this market, so we hope Sophia jumps into this area too.
(7) Homework NEW. New for 2021 some of the Sophia courses will require homework. At the time of this writing, it’s only in a few courses, but so far feedback has not been good. We don’t know if this added requirement will be adopted by all their courses or just a few, but this page will be updated when more info is available.
“Grading on E’s last two papers has been awful. The comments in her history paper were mainly rephrasing sentences. (Ex – E wrote “Farmers have had rough times before.” The grader’s correction “Farmers have had it rough before.” 🤷♀️) No helpful feedback in the paper and she got 35/50 with this final comment: “E, as you move forward. Think about how your reader can understand what you learned. Speak with a learning coach if you have doubts. This score could have been lower, but I want to give you the benefit of doubts as you move forward.” It’s not a big deal because she is still passing and we aren’t using it for high school classes since she graduated. But if the courses are going to have papers and the graders are terrible, I’m less likely to recommend it to other homeschoolers. Having someone grading other than mom is helpful to homeschoolers, but in this case Sophia’s graders are very unhelpful. In fact, it could be downright discouraging for a high schooler to receive the comment above and have no idea what you did wrong. My 8th grader had a great experience with the grader in the foundations of English class last year. So maybe it is hit or miss.” -Homeschooling for College Credit Parent Jenny B.
