* points at e-mail address *
As some of you have no doubt noticed, I'm also a Nottingham CS student.
On Fri, 2002-04-05 at 06:54, Jon Masters wrote:
> 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.
They definitely could be better, yes.
> > 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 :-)
It's spelled "paid". And I don't go to lab sessions, except the ones I
have to go to in order to use the commercial software they force on us
sometimes (like Rational Rose, which has some highly irritating
'features' I won't go into here), so this doesn't really bother me. And
when I have, I've rarely had any useful help (but then, I've rarely
required it...)
* preens ego *
Ahem.
> > 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.
Like the recent OBJ, CSD and CFJ courseworks? I'm doing CFJ next year,
but I've given advice to some people doing the course this year and it's
really not nice coursework - for one thing, it's made trivial by proper
use of the STL, and IMO if you're teaching C++, there are better ways to
force students to prove they know about memory management than making
them implement their own linked lists (even though that's pretty easy
too). Like, oh, I don't know, teaching them a decent language to start
with?
> > Lectures are boring.
I suspect that's an incurable problem. Nobody's ever going to find all
the lectures interesting. Personally I like Concurrency and Advanced
Graphics (except when my brain is busily melting out of my ears), and
Thorsten's two modules last year were great both in style and content,
but apart from that this semester I'm not the most awake person in
lectures. Although admittedly I do have a problem with the lecturing
style of certain lecturers, so that's probably got something to do with
it, because one of them teaches a module with some fairly useful if
incomplete content.
> > At Nottingham no one notices if you go to lectures or not
I like that, but there are drawbacks too, like a potential lack of
quality of learning due to apathy, etc. etc. But as Jon said, there are
some lectures I just don't want to go to. (DBS, for instance).
> > The lab sessions are harmful
> Yep.
Another reason why I don't go, although mostly it's because I can do
things with greater efficiency and more chocolate consumption on my
Linux box.
> > There is _no_ feedback at all!
> To which I'm told that's "University policy", well bollocks to that.
I really want to know how that got into the policy books.
> > 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.
That would be really messy...
> Yeah well, at least we all get to be very disgruntled together :P
Hey, it could be a hell of a lot worse, right?
Or maybe I'm just floating about because I have a job and a nice
third-year project.
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