Academy of Art University Reviews of Bachelor's in Video Game Design

"Bad school with professors who are too poor or even inferior to the students. Only a tiny percentage of professors give you useful advice. Usually, the traditional painting teachers are good, and you could have nice fundament courses. However, most teachers do not have enough aesthetics and are competent enough. You could have a terrible experience in your major courses. They will give you excessive assignments, weird feedback, and extremely low grades. And, most assignments are useless to your future career. They are only studies. When you feel you could use the assignment in your portfolio, they couldn't give you enough time to work on it instead they give you a low grade. You need to explore by yourself if you want to meet the industrial level (but you don't have enough time for most cases, as they stuff you with more useless assignments). When you finish all your courses, you will find that your work is unfinished and uncompetitive in your career field. Just don't study here."

"I’ve taken FASCU 632 OL1: Ecorche (FASCU 270) for this summer semester, and the class was the worst I ever had. Every week there were just dozens of tedious videos that weren’t easy to follow at all. The instructor didn’t provide any personal instruction in the beginning of every module. I had a hard time following the class and couldn't post on time at all. Finally I failed even if I tried my best and submitted my work for the final. I was feeling very frustrated and depressed because of it. It was really the worst experience I ever had in a class in AAU. I have a bad feeling that the Ecorche class could once again ruin another of my semesters, and result in wasting money on another failed class. I can’t put all my effort into this one class and fail all the others. This class is too hard and also requires too much space, a bunch of tools and materials. I can’t imagine how worse it would be if I had to work onsite in my dorm on this assignment. It would make even a bigger mess and even interfere with other roommates' living space. I know it is required for the degree and if I avoid this big “trouble” I eventually would be stopped from graduating by it. I would need to somehow pass this class, even though it already seemed too desperate to do so."

"Unhappy with housing. Unhappy with Instructors. online classes are garbage. The schools websites and app is garbage. The volunteer services are not valued. Health services and not available. Career services are not helpful in my field. Department directors have their hands tied. Even janitor services suck and are highly unfriendly."

"I've attended the AAU in person, and now I'm taking online courses. In person was really, truly a great experience. Online courses not so much. About 50 % of the time I get teachers who barely participate. A few times I've caught teachers cutting and pasting the exact same feedback for every student's homework - which probably means they didn't bother to review it at all. Right now I'm a Game Development major. I've had a few awesome teachers. But the teachers don't put the module content in place. Nor do they create the tests themselves. The video tutorials and module content for software we must learn is often about 5 - 6 years out of date. In particular, Unity, Maya, or 3D Studio Max is horribly outdated. The latest versions have very different interfaces and much expanded capabilities. The existing videos are so bad that I'm forced to find tutorials wherever I can (Youtube, or Lynda, or wherever) just to get the necessary info I need to do my homework. And if you think the teachers tell us where to go to find accurate, updated info, you'd be mistaken. And Youtube is full of thousands of crappy, inaccurate tutorial videos. Doing research is fine, but I expect the core lessons to be covered in the class I'm paying for. Incidentally, each online class costs about $2,600+ per semester. That's a lot of money to shell out for out of date information. I'm not sure why a school that costs this much money, in a world-class city like San Francisco, in a 1st world country, can't manage to keep its course material up to date. Oh, yeah, I forgot. The administrators have really luxurious lifestyles and give themselves big fat paychecks. They aren't investing in their courses, and I'm guessing most of my teachers are adjunct professors being paid less than crap. Why should they care about showing up? I've thought of transferring, but guess what? Those credits don't transfer, and the Academy won't accept a lot of transfer credits. It's a good gig for them: helps them keep students and forces students to take classes they don't really need."

"Don't go here for the game design degree. Just don't. Please. Let me elaborate, You're paying this school for a degree that will teach you the skills you need to have a fighting chance at getting a job in the industry, right? I mean that's what you should be doing...Game design is an insanely competitive field ok? Most of the game design specific classes are a joke. They won't challenge you to do better and they won't fail you if you're bad. It's the worst of both worlds. You could be the worst artist in history but if you manage to at least show up to 3 or 4 classes you'll still pass. It doesn't even matter to them, because they already have your money. Need more convincing? One of the required classes is a "game history" course. Now, you figure that would entail some...oh say history of gaming right? Wrong. You get to pay $3000 for a class where literally all you will do is sit in the classroom for 3 hours every week playing random old video games that your classmates have haphazardly brought in. There is NO structure to the class whatsoever. No history. Just playing random ass old games people bring in on a whim. Welcome to the Game Design Department. Look, I get it, maybe you're hell bent on going to AAU. I'm not going to stop you. There are some really good programs. (The Illustration department for example, is fantastic) But please, just do me this simple favor, DO NOT join the Game Design program. If you want to learn 3d modeling software or Photoshop there are a million cheap online resources you can use. (Eat3d, Polycount.com, and many, many more) And guess what, I just saved you $100,000! Seriously that's how much this degree costs....probably more now since they raise their prices almost every year. You can thank me later when you manage to land your first industry job without having been saddled with so much debt that your grandchildren will still be paying it off!"