London School of International Business - www.lsib.co.uk

I'm enrolled in their Level 7 Extended Diploma in Strategic Management.

I went for the basic package and I'm currently near to 2 months into the 9 months course and based on my experience, it's really painful dealing with them.

Below a few reasons why:

1) Poor quality of materials - The materials they provide you is very minimal and will definitely not be enough to complete your assignments (usually one material for 1 subject). I understand that I need to do extra research but what I don't expect is the typo and grammatical errors in the given material which made it painful to read and understand (grammatical errors distorted the meaning of the sentence). Also, when I want to read further on certain topics in the material, I find that there's no reference or bibliography included, which makes research a lot harder.

2) Lack of materials in eLibrary - Out of 10 items in their Suggested Reading list, you will be lucky to find 1 available in the eLibrary. I've done 2 subjects and 1st subject has 1 match and 2nd subject has 0 match. So you just have to look for materials yourself somewhere else.

3) Lack of support - Again, my package do NOT come with 1-to-1 time with tutor. This means all questions I have on the assignments and the subject matter have to be sent to their administrator. I mean no disrespect to her (there’s only one staff that I’m aware of) but she does not have the right knowledge on the subject matter and assignment questions. So she will usually give me generic answers or give me inaccurate info on where to find answers (sending me on wild goose chase). Mind you, my questions are simple ones to clarify the assignment tasks and not in-depth theoretical or ideological debate. But the reply I get is useless to me so I'm totally on my own. I've asked LSIB to allow me to contact someone with some idea of the subject and assignment content but they refused. I've made a lot of noise and they agreed to arrange for a call between the professor and I which is supposed to happen this morning but it's already 1 hour passed the appointment time and I still have not received any call. I've tried emailing them and contacting them through their webchat but received no reply so I'm still just waiting for the call... This speaks volume of the level of customer service you can expect from them.

4) Poor customer service - I'm not sure if they are understaffed but the administrator is very careless and uninformative. If my email contains 3 questions, she will only answer 2, totally ignoring the 3rd one. If I ask 5 questions, she will probably answer 3 (you get the picture). This happens not just once or twice but around 90% of the time. So I have to keep following up with her. Also, when she actually answers something, sometimes she’s not answering your questions, or sometimes she’s giving you only partial info that you have asked for. So I have to, again, follow up with her. My emails to her for simple questions will usually have 8 - 14 back and forth emails to finally get my answers (if I’m lucky, sometimes I just give up without getting the answers). For instance, I recently received my result for a subject and I was sent 4 grades (2 Merit and 2 Distinction) for the 4 tasks in the assignment. I've asked her 3 times on how I should tabulate the final result for the course with 4 grades for one subject. In summary, she has totally ignored that question and I just gave up on following up on that. But I did find out from her after around 6-8 emails between us that I got Merit for the subject (I don’t know how they derive that but I just don’t want to go through the pain of getting that answer). I still have no idea how that grade will be counted for the course result as a whole. BTW, you can only reach LSIB via email; they do NOT have a contact number.

5) Careless assessor – The assessor graded my assignment wrongly the first time. The work that I did for task 3 & 4 are graded into task 1 & 2, giving me result that is above the maximum for task 1 & 2 and below my expectation for task 3 & 4. It took another 6 emails to get that sorted out. Again, all communications are through the administrator only.

In conclusion, if you are working full time like me, do not go with LSIB because you will realised that a lot of your time is not spent on studying but on logistic, communication and administration. If you have plenty of time to spare, want to pay minimal fees to get the certificate from ATHE, you can go for it. I’m already behind on my assignment but I just want to take the time to write this review so that people out there will not get stuck with LSIB like me.