Vista Higher Learning
website thubmnail of Vista Higher Learning

Vista Higher Learning

How would you rate Vista Higher Learning?
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Delaware
1 review
1 helpful vote
Follow Lanni F.
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Bad
January 24, 2025

Vhl is the worst it makes me cry :( is always laggs and is very mean. It kicks me out. To all teachers: do not torture you student with this website. If you forget one letter it tanks your grade by 25%.

Date of experience: January 24, 2025
Oklahoma
1 review
0 helpful votes
Follow Claudia Y.
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If you are a college student ESPECIALLY one using financial aid or barely making ends meet DO NOT ORDER A BOOK FROM VHL! You will most likely not get a physical copy of the book, and you will not be able to sell the book after use or get a refund. You're essentially paying $100.00+ for a CODE to a book that you can only use for one semester and never again. IT IS A COMPLETE SCAM. Take another class because any class that uses the VHL platform is not worth it and completely predatory to students struggling with finances. Even if you aren't struggling with finances this is a SCAM.

Date of experience: October 28, 2024
California
1 review
8 helpful votes
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Horrible.
March 5, 2023

- This website is horrible. The activities are ridiculously hard and if you don't understand what you're doing wrong, you either have to look up the answers on quizlet to save your grade, then learn nothing, or you fail the assignment.
- It was extremely expensive.
- Not geared for helping people learn. The 'interactive' textbook doesn't even pronounce words, or let you copy and paste directly out of the book.
- Some of the problems in the book are so advanced. Without help it's almost impossible to learn because they do not provide ANSWERS. Even if you wanted to put in extra hours to study, it's virtually impossible if you're not understanding the problems because there are no answers or explanations to any questions.
- Quality: This textbook is not organized in a way that English speakers will easily grasp the grammatical usage in the Spanish language. The set up is honestly so counter-intuitive.

Date of experience: March 5, 2023
New Jersey
1 review
9 helpful votes
Follow Not T.
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The speaking part
September 12, 2024

To all the people who created the "speech" section, go F u C K yourself🖕. I have been sitting here for the past 30 minutes repeating the numbers 1-30 flawlessly, FLAWLESSLY, and this bull $hit a$s website keeps saying wrong, wrong, wrong. PLEASE fix your microphone because I am almost on the verge of destroying my computer as I know it. If anyone else is dealing with this problem use my comment to reply under.

Date of experience: September 12, 2024
Arizona
1 review
1 helpful vote
Follow Mal Z.
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I was excited to enroll in an online class for self-paced learning, the concept worked well in regard to working full time while trying to earn my degree.

I was under the impression that I was a strong-willed, emotionally resilient person. That was before opening this website for the first time, and I am not exaggerating. There have been a few times where I have been at a breaking point and had to walk away.

Right off the bat, this program is unforgiving and incredibly time consuming. It's killed any motivation to truly learn Spanish, which like I said, I was excited to do before!

I cannot believe that the college I'm enrolled in would sign off on this course. Please don't make the same mistake I did.

Date of experience: September 5, 2023
California
1 review
3 helpful votes
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HORRIBLE Experience
August 7, 2023

I purchased what I thought was a hardcover textbook & workbook. I made a mistake and purchased only the digital text & workbook. I received the workbook and contacted them to return the digital book or pay the difference for the hardcover text. They said their systems do not allow for partial refunds of any kind. I don't know any online purchase I have ever made where I have to return ALL the items to get the correct item. Now I have to incur the shipping costs to return the physical workbook and get refunded just to purchase it all over again. I will be making that purchase somewhere else and I'll even be willing to pay more. Ridiculous. They don't 0 stars, but you have to select at least 1 to submit the review.

Date of experience: August 7, 2023
South Carolina
1 review
3 helpful votes
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My senior in high school signed up for a course to start the semester and obtained the required textbook for it from Vista Higher Learning. After further discussion with her advisor she decided to drop the course and take something more appropriate for her direction within the first two days. VHL will not refund the $149.00 text. Granted their policy does state "No refunds, no exceptions" for online texts somewhere in the writeup on it. However, this policy and response takes advantage of 17 year olds and their families who are simply trying to move forward in their education. This policy alone should be enough that no school should utilize Vista Higher Learning for providing the texts for their courses.

Date of experience: February 26, 2024
Oregon
1 review
4 helpful votes
Follow Blow M.
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It is nothing short of baffling how unintuitive the learning 'process' is for this service. The amount of mandatory homework for classes is incredibly tedious and does nothing but frustrate and agonize when they randomly decide to use words they have never gone over in quizzes and exams, forcing you to use google translate if you're lucky enough to not be proctored, or to bite the bullet and hope you can guess correctly using context clues. You might as well just watch youtube videos, you will probably get further.

Date of experience: March 12, 2023
Minnesota
1 review
2 helpful votes
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Not the best
January 21, 2024

All in all, in person learning trumps this in every way. It's nothing unique or special, only multiple choice questions assinged by the teacher with maybe videos, audio, and a calendar with due dates. Every other site on the internet has these, don't pay for this one. VHL was just fine in high school when it was free and all, but now when we have to buy textbooks for college the $#*! is a complete scam. Careful cause their policy is no refunds, so goodbye $20 and their programs they run suck for handling them anyhow.

Date of experience: January 21, 2024
New York
1 review
1 helpful vote
Follow Kayla D.
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This website needs to be updated with the following errors. There needs to be better examples for the assignments and they marked answers that were correct wrong. The price for the book should be cheaper

Date of experience: December 11, 2023
Arizona
1 review
1 helpful vote
Follow Robert F.
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This website will use the most confusing and twisted methods upon initial purchase of their material to try and milk as much money out of their consumers. I purchased my online textbook access for $150, as I was told I needed it to access my class. Low and behold, even then I could not access my class, as they now told me I needed to buy extra supplementary content in order to ACTUALLY gain access to my class. Now instead of getting the initial bundle of both items which would have saved me money, they scammed me into buying both seperately in order to maximize profits. Extremely scummy practice, cannot wait to see this company fall to lawsuits.

Date of experience: August 24, 2023
New York
1 review
3 helpful votes
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The primary issue with this is the grading system, which is extremely discouraging and anxiety inducing. There is zero partial credit, even for a perfectly correct response. It must be word for word, letter for letter, what the program deems the singular correct answer. This even applies to full sentence length responses, and it is just not feasible to ask the teacher for partial credit for EVERY. SINGLE. ASSESSMENT. Because it risks painting the student as greedy and grade-obsessed, when really, we just want the points we deserve. It is extremely disheartening when I answer with the entire sentence structured and conjugated correctly, but receive a zero because of a single typo--ONE CHARACTER OFF!--out of an entire correct sentence. Many times the system marks completely correct responses 100% wrong, just because I left out the subject pronoun when it was completely unnecessary. It is way to easy to end up with a 70 due to minor errors like these despite knowing the content thoroughly. Additionally, I tried to contact support to ask them about a flaw in the system, but only received an automated bot response. I would stay away from this program if possible, as it has caused nothing but extreme stress and worsened anxiety.

Date of experience: August 14, 2024
North Carolina
1 review
1 helpful vote
Follow D A.
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The teach gave us wrong info on which book to buy (we bought the 'Prime' version, needed 'Supersite'). VHL wouldn't let us return one and buy the other. In fact, we had purchased the more expensive version, and instead of just giving us access to the Supersite version and keeping the difference, we had to completely eat the more expensive, and buy the less expensive version. The customer service person was nice, but utterly unhelpful. I have recommended the school find a different vendor for this product, and will continue to advocate against this company if they can't fix this type of thing.

Date of experience: September 13, 2023
North Dakota
1 review
21 helpful votes
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It's just dumb
April 3, 2021

Honestly if you want to learn a language please use Duolingo. This platform is not good, ever two seconds it says that you get a 0% for putting a space at the end of a single word. I know this sounds kinda dumb, but I was assigned this for school and every time I opened the app I just immediately felt sad no matter what happened.

Date of experience: April 3, 2021
Michigan
1 review
6 helpful votes
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Accidentally purchased the wrong version for my class. (why there are two versions for the same thing is beyond me.) No way to get my $150 back even though I noticed it within 5 minutes. Seems to be just a good way for them to make money. So far the program has been terrible as well. Why teachers use this money stealing program is beyond me. If you can avoid it, but unfortunately like in my situation my class requires it so they go $300 from me.

Date of experience: September 6, 2022
Florida
1 review
9 helpful votes
Follow Zachary K.
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This is NOT a program for learning! Instructions are in the language you don't know, no explanations or instructions when you get answers incorrect, and after the allotted number of tries you get the answer wrong.
Total scam! My money would have been better spent on Rosetta Stone, or drugs than this program. After I pass this class (because that's all I actually care about) I'll get Rosetta Stone and actually learn Spanish.
Thank you for reinforcing the voices that echo the scam college has become.

Date of experience: September 28, 2019
Illinois
1 review
5 helpful votes
Follow John S.
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This program is just busy work to make it cheaper and easier to teach a new language but it does a horrible job at it. I spend way too many hours of my life trying to complete these incoherent activities.

Date of experience: October 9, 2019
California
1 review
4 helpful votes
Follow John J.
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Don't know if Vista Higher learning vet their teachers, but they hire the likes of Rosanna Keppeler who on October 26th, 2019 in Stafford Virginia (Case # 179GC*******-00) was arrested for refusing to take a breathalyzer test. Consequently convicted of a DUI. I'm sure there are many good teachers out there, Why encourage drunk driving. I had a close family member seriously crippled for life from a drunk driver. If this is some kind of forgiveness to this person, why don't they disclose this first. Why should i spend money learning from a fake?

Date of experience: September 5, 2023
Maryland
1 review
5 helpful votes
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This website is ridiculous. I don't know why my school for every language class I've taken so far wants to use outside websites that don't work properly for a crap ton of money that comes with a textbook that you don't even get a physical copy of unless you pay an absorbent amount of money for. I'm now extremely behind of my assignments because the website didn't keep records of any of them.

Date of experience: February 8, 2023
Tennessee
2 reviews
1 helpful vote
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SCAM!
August 22, 2022

Do not order product from this company! Refused to give a refund even though I called as soon as I ordered virtual book by mistake and never used access code. Customer service worked from home and said there is nothing they can do because there is no supervisor there!

Date of experience: August 22, 2022

Overview

Vista Higher Learning has a rating of 1.3 stars from 104 reviews, indicating that most customers are generally dissatisfied with their purchases. Reviewers dissatisfied with Vista Higher Learning most frequently mention access code, customer service and foreign language. Vista Higher Learning ranks 183rd among Language Learning sites.

service
42
value
43
shipping
30
returns
33
quality
42