I am enrolled in the Georgia Tech online computer science masters (OMSCS). The rigour and the grading is the same as for internal students for many classes. Some classes even posted comparison results for exams between online and internal students (results are very close in every statistical measure, even the number of failures is similar). There is a substantial workload required to pass courses and I have taken leave from work in order to complete assignments. Saying a masters is at least a dedicated full time job is delusional and out of whack with many students today. I worked the whole way through my undergrad because my parents were not wealthy and I needed to live in another city to go to university, I was not alone in this.<p>Cheating is cracked down upon and students have been expelled for collusion. Exams are proctored by humans or AIs (it is easy to do eye tracking and screen scraping, it even detected me trying to open the exam from a VM and refused to open). These (Georgia Tech&#x27;s, MIT&#x27;s, Standford&#x27;s, etc) online programs are going to eat the middle out of the rest of the university sector as the content is substantially better than most midrange universities for a fraction of the price. You may be prejudiced against online programs for whatever reason but they are here to stay at the top end and the bottom end and it is important to be able to distinguish between the two.