4 ms·
Overachievers should not be able to raise the bar. If they can, then the system is broken. Grades should be relative to the course content, not the abilities of
by jmts 8y ago
Overachievers should not be able to raise the bar. If they can, then the system is broken. Grades should be relative to the course content, not the abilities of the students.
When I started university, it was clear that I had much more experience programming than the other students, but I had to do certain introductory classes anyway because there was no way to receive credit for half a decade of self learning. On one assignment my lecturer went looking for things to mark me down on that were outside the scope of the assignment because "it would look suspicious if you got a perfect grade".
Some people are just capable of more than is expected of that class for whatever reason, not because they intend to demoralise everyone else and break the system.
- noir_lord 8y agoSimilar story when I was at college (UK meaning) (late 90s). Final project was an inventory system for a company. Mine was a RDBMS backed system that implemented proper stock control with parent/child SKU handling etc (I went to the library and checked out books on inventory control) and was fully documented (180 pages of documentation) and a full user manual with a FAQ. I thought that was what professional programmers did...man was I in for a shock when I hit industry.
- DrScump 8y agoI started at a junior college and then transferred to a four-year University. There was a time when I was going to University where I was still backfilling some course credits to complete my Associates degree from my work at the junior college. The respective school catalogs deemed some courses at one school to be equivalent to courses at the other school without really having them reexamined on a regular basis. As a result, one of the courses (Statistics?) that I needed to complete my Associate's degree requirements translated to a much simpler course equivalent at the University. After the first day of class, the teacher came up to me and asked me, "what the heck are you doing here?" because he could tell from my interactions in class that I was already beyond the material of the course. I explained to him the situation, and he offered to come up with some sort of a challenge exam for which he would just give me full credit for the course. instead, I served as a kind of a de facto T.A. for about half time for the rest of the course.
- yaleman 8y agoI did intro to programming as part of a degree as a mature-aged student and the only way to get a good mark was to do an "extra project" that the professor would sign off on. I wanted to make a GUI RSS reader with the ability to email links from things to people, that wasn't interesting/challenging enough in a class where we were learning about functions and loops. I gave up and took the not-perfect mark, quit the degree because their entire system was ridiculous, and haven't missed it.