Hi,
OK so perhaps this isn't the best place for it, but I'll chip in too -
though most people I meet quickly find out my opinion on this stuff :-)
Note the repeated use of the phrase "James is right" below...
On Fri, 5 Apr 2002, James Maitland Chapman wrote:
> I'm a student at Nottingham and I really don't like the way programming
> courses are done here.
James is right.
> The lab sessions are run by payed undergrads and postgrads who are there to
> help you but they end up just doing it for some people and spotting
> trivial problems. This a real handholding approach and really doesn't
> work.
James is right, except you're making it sound better than it is :-)
> Coursework is of course the right way to go providing it is of quality.
...and unforuntately mostly sucks arse because it's boring and silly.
> Lectures are boring.
I suppose I'd actually say "half the courses are boring" or something to
that effect - many are completely worthless and pointless for anyone who
actually takes an interest in the subject, the rest are fairly interesting
though at the moment I'm only taking 2.5 courses that interest me
(Compilers because I can use it to feed in to personal learning on code
generation and stuff not being covered on the course, Concurrency because
that kind of thing turns me on, and the 0.5 for the C++ course which I'm
doing purely for the available marks and because I might decide to learn
STL properly or something...). Anyway, short answer: James is right.
> At Nottingham no one notices if you go to lectures or not
I don't think that particularly matters one bit, in fact I think
hand-holdy monitoring/registering systems are far far worse - there are
some lectures people just don't want to go to (for example perhaps courses
dealing with nonsense or **ABSOLUTELY ANY** taught by the "IT" people (web
bullshit, e-commerce, that kind of utter crap) and some that are actually
interesting (any taught by rcb, dfb, hardcore cs types etc.). The trouble
is more that there's no global sense of a relationship with the department
- we're mostly just numeric identifiers and user names providing income :-)
> The lab sessions are harmful
Yep.
> There is _no_ feedback at all!
To which I'm told that's "University policy", well bollocks to that.
> But I suppose this is the nature of doing a course with far to many
> students, nowhere near enough lectures and a large amount of people on
> the payroll to *support* modules, what a load of bollocks!
Like I said in the pub last night, we need:
1). A sunrise.
2). 75-80% attendence
3). A firing squad.
> Bar humbug.
Yeah well, at least we all get to be very disgruntled together :P
Jon.
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