The UoPeople CompSci Curriculum Guide

In 2025 they received USA regional accreditation so I would expect the fees to go up soon. This accreditation means you have the same piece of paper of any state school in the US and can use it for an online MSc like Georgia Tech or Johns Hopkins or anywhere else.

Here is the computer science curriculum you have to pass those first 20 courses to be able to take the electives. To get a BSc these 13 courses have to be taken too which is very typical of an undergrad degree or breadth requirements meaning taking courses outside your major.

The application fee and exam fees are based on your country's GDP and slightly discounted if you're living in the poorest regions otherwise the exam fees presently are $140 USD each and the full CompSci BSc requires 40 exams some of which require proctors (another fee). You pay as you go and the final cost will be around $5600 plus whatever proctor fees unless you get financial aid or scholarship.

A regular state or commonwealth university is lowest bound $40k for tuition alone not including all the other fees.

An exam proctor or invigilator is someone you ask or pay to watch you taking an exam. The definition of who can be a proctor is pretty loose in their guidelines. If you know anyone in your country with some kind of recognized profession like a notary or librarian you can ask them to watch you for free otherwise ProctorU and many online services exist. Local universities typically charge $40-60 for this and are easier than screwing around with ProctorU tech. Maybe 7 or so courses are proctored but this can always change.

The only requirements for the CompSci BSc is proof of high school graduation (diploma or GED) and the ability to read and write English. I sent a photo of my highschool diploma that I was surprised to find buried in some storage box while visiting my parents. If you apply from a country that doesn't use English as an official language it's likely they will force you to take an extra English course, which you can appeal after being accepted.

There are 5 terms per year. P/T studies is 1 course per term and F/T is 2 courses per term, depending on your academic standing you can register for more. Most courses are 3 credits, consist of 8 weeks of lessons/assignments/quizzes, and the 9th week is the final exam. You can also apply for a leave of absence to take a term or more off.

This means you can finish a BSc in 2 years if you take a F/T course load but some of the courses require an enormous amount of work you may wish to start P/T like I did and switch to F/T later.

There are no live lectures which is great that means you can finish these courses on your own schedule and work F/T during the day.

The 8 weeks look exactly like this:

• read the online learning guide notes
• read assigned chapters of a book
• do assignments
  • usually 'discussion assignment' writing a detailed summary
• peer grading (see below)
• take self quiz
• take graded quiz

Week 9 you write the exam which can be anywhere from 1-2hrs.

All the materials are free and can be downloaded for offline work. They use some edtech Moodle which many other schools like ETH Zurich use. There is a class discussion forum plus Yammer which is some proprietary Microsoft app that is a mix between Facebook and Slack that I only ever used to have my assignments fixed from the bad peer grading. Most of the program assignments you upload the source .py or .java files and the output as a .doc for grading so you will need Open Office or something similar.

There's a sort of global forum for students to post but I avoided that as it seems easy to get yourself expelled posting in one of the many political cringe threads. You have friends in real life and if they're not in your class forum then don't waste your time in the global forum.

This is a global school so you have to spell out what you are doing with almost too much documentation. Expect the person reading/reviewing your work speaks no English at all and you should do fine. Whenever I had a bad peer grade I appealed to the instructor who reversed it but I have heard from other students that sometimes they don't bother.

This means the key to success at this school to graduate with a 4+ GPA is to finesse the peer reviewed assignments by assuming whoever is grading you needs total hand holding and to keep the work within the parameters of the material for example I wrote a bunch of assignments in recursive code that nobody understood so they gave me a poor review.

I will inject some optional side projects I'm already doing elsewhere like the USACO guide and Andy Pavlo's new open course on building an optimizer if time permits but the UoPeople curriclum is fine if you are curious and really dig into it and treat is seriously. We can super charge the general education requirements too for example we can learn Latin which is a hack to get better at English.

This is a mandatory course you take about the perils of cheating, how to organize your time and how to study. Many students cut+paste their assignments and were banned in the courses I took don't be one of those students.

Syllabus here. Could be combined with Arkadiy Skopenkov's Algebra Through Problems here and then focus on the trig identity drilling in the assigned book because you know that will be on the exam they always love using trig problems. From google research this is a hard course with 40 pages of reading assigned per week and a ton of problems to do but will payoff later.

Syllabus here. Uses OpenStax text which you could combine with asymptotics.

Syllabus here. Poh-Shen Loh uploaded his CMU combinatorics course to YouTube it is vastly more advanced but watching just a few of these lectures helps you understand how to do these problems. You could also do some of taocp.

Syllabus here and there's many free workbooks on probability/stats and lectures on the central limit theorem.

8 week course that follows the first 12 chapters of the book How to Think Like a Computer Scientist by Allen B. Downey. You could combine this course with another no problem if you already have some kind of programming background.

Practice:

• CodeCheck Python exercises
• TA-Generated Problems from CMU's 15-110 similar to the Downey book
• 15-112 which has much more difficult assignments. Click on each topic, there are short video lectures.

I have never liked Python, it is unacceptable trash to me. Python 2 was a scoping disaster and Python 3 scope is also trash. Any library builtin you use is going to pollute the entire global scope. It is what Robert Harper refers to as a bucket language where all the designers just throw everything in a bucket and each new addition breaks everything else in the bucket. The only reason anyone uses Python is because of the vast amount of wrappers around C++ libraries otherwise it should permanently die and writing any non-trivial Python code is like playing russian roulette in my opinion.

Uses this book when I took it. Straight-forward intro to Java that anyone can do, can also be combined with another course the work load wasn't too much.

Practice:

• CodinGame easy and medium puzzles you can do in Java.
• 6.031 MIT's 2021 version which still used Java (now TypeScript).
  • Assignments on OCW but reading the notes is good enough.

TODO I am now re-enrolled and waiting for next semester to begin.

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