ISSA College of Exercise Science

Hi ***--You had initially enrolled in the course back on 2/3/20. Per the enrollment agreement, your cancellation eligibility is based on the overall course completion. As of 2/11/20 you had entered the final exam and have been ineligible for cancellation since that time. We tried reaching out to you per your request to cancel numerous times but were never able to get a hold of you. At this time, because you have started the final exam for the CFT course, we would not be able to refund you for the purchase of the CFT course. Even if you were looking to stop pursuing the certification, you would still be responsible for the remainder of the payments for the CFT course.

That being said, we'd like to work with you on the remaining two courses and cancel your future payments for the Senior Fitness and the Sports Nutrition courses reducing your overall payments.

But what complicates things is you purchased these three courses and received significant reductions in the cost of those three courses because it was a package deal. If you were to purchase the CFT alone, the retail cost would have been $799 for that one course (often times on sale for $599). And because we are canceling future payments for the Senior and Sports Nutrition course, that means that the discount you received on the Fitness Trainer course when purchased with the other two, the cost will have to be increased to $599 (instead of the current $333) for the CFT.

So, bottom line is this:

1. ISSA cannot refund a course where all the quizzes are completed and the final exam has been started. That is stated in the enrollment agreement. You will be responsible for the future payments to satisfy the cost of the CFT course totaling $559 (you already paid $40 toward that total). You earned it, you will receive a certification for it once you complete the final and begin payments.

2. ISSA will stop future payments on the Senior Fitness and the Sports Nutrition thereby reducing your overall payments by about 50%.

Thank you.

Mrs. S's request was denied because the disability documents she shared with us revealed that her disability actually started months prior to purchasing our course. So this was not a development that started AFTER she enrolled in our course.

The Certified Fitness Trainer course and accompanying final examination are designed to engage the student and prepare them for the job of providing a service to their future clients and it is challenging.

There are three parts to the final examination, true-false questions, multiple choice questions and the written portion (or learning experiences) of the exam which encompasses both essay questions and case studies.

Students can find all the answers to the true-false and multiple-choice questions in the content of the supplied textbook. The learning experiences (or written) part of the exam begins with the essay portion, where there are 6 total essays requiring students to provide a 250-word answer to.

Each of the 6 learning experiences contains 4 to 9 different topics for students to select from to provide a 250-word answer and does, indeed, include at least one option where the answer is covered in the content of the textbook. The other options do require outside resources, ISSA’s text can’t possibly cover every aspect of fitness. But as stated, each essay question does have at least one option whose answers can be found in the textbook. Additionally, the answers required for the case studies portion of the final are available in the textbook as well.

Lastly, our terms and conditions do state that there are no refunds provided after 30 days from date of purchase—which, in Heather’s situation, expired on July 7, 2019.
Tell us why here...

A*** signed up for her CFT course on 12/22/2018, and completed all of her quizzes by 2/20/2019. The first record we show of her requesting a cancellation or refund was on 3/26/2019. Because 100% of her quizzes had been complete at that point, she was no longer eligible for a refund or cancellation (the ISSA enrollment agreement states eligibility ends after 60% of the course has been completed). Additionally, A states that the problem occurred on 1/15/19, however her first contact to us was on 3/19/19, which was to adjust her payment date. This reflects that as of 3/19 she still intended to pay and remain in the course. This is contradictory to her statement that she requested cancellation previously. Per the ISSA enrollment agreement, which A agreed to, " If a payment option is established between an ISSA enrollment representative and the student, subsequent monthly payment(s) will be due in 30-day increments after the initial payment has been processed and deducted electronically from the checking/credit card account of record unless other payment arrangements have been made. ". Per this agreement, we charged the payment method that was on account. A new payment method was not provided, so we continued to charge the method on account. As a courtesy to the student, we issued a refund in absence of another payment method being provided on 3/26/2019. However, a new payment method was not provided beyond that, so when the student called back on 5/22 to request a refund, we told her we would be happy to provide one, as soon as a new payment method was provided, per the terms in her agreement. At this point, we are still happy to provide a refund, pending payment being made via another method. However, because A is not eligible for a refund or cancellation, we do not feel it is appropriate to provide a refund in the absence of another payment method being provided.

As we spelled out in the previous response, we are happy to refund her money. To keep this simple, we will refund this student's $206, however, this time to her original credit card.

I requested the recorded phone call between this student (Torraine Walton) and our representative to better understand what transpired. I listened to the entire call.Here is what I found:Torraine did ask about the payment method and asked if she could pay with her checking account information because she did not have enough money on her bank card to cover the cost of the initial payment. The rep told her she could pay with her checking account information because it would clear the next day.Once she had provided her checking account information she asked about the monthly billing and the rep CLEARLY tells her to call our billing department to get the checking account removed. He even provided her with a separate email with our contact. information (the billing department). She replied, "OK", indicating she understood she needed to call us to change her payment method and to remove the checking information.
M***ISSADirector of State Authorization