Experience report on courses at Westcliff:
During my semester abroad at Westcliff University, I chose four courses with 6 ECTS credits each. My focused lied on finance and marketing. There are usually between 10-20 students in a course.
Workload
The amount of work in the various courses depends very much on the respective professors. However, there is a standard attendance requirement, which is assessed at 100% and accounts for 2% of the overall grade. If you are unable to attend class, you have the option of handing in a VCS. After the class is over, you have to upload a 2-3 page summary of the class, depending on the professor how detailed it should be.
Assignments and the Gap Portal
Furthermore, there are usually at least four assignments that have to be handed in over eight weeks. In addition, a discussion question of at least 250 words must be answered each week. Additionally, each student must respond to two answers from fellow students about what they think of their answer/what they may have learned or what they liked/disliked. Westcliff works with a portal called Gap.westcliff, where you can find all the important information about the courses and also important e-mail addresses of professors. In the respective course you will find an overview of how each week is organized and which assignments are due in which week. You will also find the course syllabus, which describes the course in detail and each assignment in detail.
Grades and lecture times
To pass the course, you need an average grade of 74%. A term lasts eight weeks and you have 3 hours of lessons per course. Classes usually run from 1:40-4:40, with a 15-minute break. However, there are also courses that start at 6:20 and end around 9:20.
Structure of the lesson
A normal class usually looks like this. First, the professor introduces a topic and towards the middle/end of the lesson we should give a short presentation on different contents in small groups. For example, in my social media marketing class, we were asked to create a campaign for a company that sells plant-based meat. As a big final project at Westcliff University, almost every course has a group assignment in week eight where you have to apply what you've learned. For example, in my Working Capital Management course, the assignment was to analyze a company's working capital. We were asked to create a podcast in which we talked about our findings and then presented this as a group in week eight of the course.
Comparison with Germany
Personally, I really liked the American university system at Westcliff University. I particularly liked the Gap Portal, as you can find everything you need online straight away. The professors were always nice and communicated the topics very well to us students. As mentioned, the amount of work is comparatively small and the assignments were very interesting. I wasn't used to compulsory attendance at my university, so it was a change for me, but I really enjoyed it.
