11 ms·

My ICT teacher can’t mark my homework

104 points by robinhouston 15y ago

nmcfarl 15y ago
ICT appears to mean "Information and Communications Technologies" something I didn’t know. Also man is that a depressing story.
- Tibbes 15y ago
  Brief summary of computing in UK schools: Back in the days of the BBC Micro, computing in schools involved some programming. After that (probably in the early nineties), the subject split into two: Computer Science and IT. Then with the rise of the internet IT was renamed CIT (Communications and Information Techologies) and finally reordered to ICT. Computer Science was also renamed Computing at some stage. ICT involves no or extremely minimal programming. Computing does, but it has proved the less popular option and died out in the majority of schools - partly due to an uninspiring syllabus and lack of teachers.
  - ElliotH 15y ago
    There is in fact a Computer Science GCSE and A level which is distinct from Computing. The A level computing syllabus (haven taken it myself) is quite dated, but one of the two papers does involve some writing of pseudocode, and the coursework is a programming project with lots of freedom (as well as a bucketload of documentation writing)
    - estel 15y ago
      Really? I'd never heard of them, and a quick Google doesn't find any Computer Science GCSE or A-level that isn't a colloquial reference to the Computing A level.
      - ElliotH 15y ago
        Its anecdotal, but I know a few people who definitely claim to have taken 'Computer Science' as opposed to 'Computing' A levels.
    - seabee 15y ago
      As someone who did take the Computing A-level this is exactly it. I also took the lesson on writing some simple ASP - the teacher (who was the headmaster, oddly enough) knew his limitations and knew enough about me to entrust that particular lesson to. But it would be a ludicrous prospect in any other subject!
  - arethuza 15y ago
    Please stop saying "UK schools" - the education system in some parts of the UK is completely different to England's.
  - AlexC04 15y ago
    Worse than that, difficult courses have much lower pass rates and scores. Teaching them is risking your standing on the league tables. It also precludes your ability to teach the 4 credit GCSE in ICT which (at my last school) got a 100% pass rate. If you funnel every kid in your school through a course on which 100% of them get 4 GCSE credits and target measure on the league tables is percentage of students who get 5 GCSEs, then you're going to do it. Remember, funding, promotions and everything else is based on your standing on the league tables. No. Actually Teaching programming in your computer classes is a recipe for failure.
    - lhnz 15y ago
      It would be interesting if somebody was to create a League Tables Redux with weighted standings dependent on (a) number of people passing a course and (b) popularity of subject with upper-league employers/universities.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
roel_v 15y ago
It's stories like this where I would like to see a more 'journalistic' approach, i.e. hearing both sides of a story. I have a hard time believing a teacher would simply put an 'F' on a project because, even though he's seen it running on the phones of his colleagues, he would say 'I don't understand how it works so I'll just fail it'. On the other hand, I have no such qualms believing a version where a 16 year old who thinks he's God's gift to mankind (hey, I was one of those) puts something together that doesn't fit the requirements of the project, submits it despite being repeatedly being steered in a different direction, comes up with unrealistic readings and interpretations of the assignment or context of the class to get them to fit his world view, and then (even if he does get a passing mark in the end) complains to everybody who will listen about how he's being discriminated against and how much smarter than everybody else he is, and oh I'm so wasting my time here between all these morons. I've been that student in an eerily similar situation, although I was 18 at the time and it was Jave Applets which were a hot new thing back then, and if I would have been my teacher at the time, I would've failed me, too (although the one I actually had did too give me a passing mark out of pittance). In short, sounds like biased view, happily accepted by the author to 'prove' his pet peeve (a pretty marginal one, for that matter), but devoid of real value or content.
- alextgordon 15y ago
  > It's stories like this where I would like to see a more 'journalistic' approach, i.e. hearing both sides of a story. I have a hard time believing a teacher would simply put an 'F' on a project because, even though he's seen it running on the phones of his colleagues, he would say 'I don't understand how it works so I'll just fail it'. You have to understand how the system works in the UK. From ages 15-18, there are ~4 years of exams, preparation for exams, that kind of thing. Ultimately these exams are mostly meaningless, their main purpose is to get you a place at university (which is only 3 years, go figure). The exams are set by these big official exam boards. Now during this time, the teachers aren't going to be thinking "Does this deserve an A", they're going to be thinking "Would an examiner give this an A". The exam boards circulate marking schemes. If it doesn't meet the criteria sufficiently (has the candidate demonstrated with this that they know the difference between a file and a folder in this project?), it's not going to be given an A, regardless of merit. I've had teachers explain to me that otherwise A-quality projects have been given low marks because they were written in C++ instead of VB6.
robterrell 15y ago
This is a enormous failure of the teacher. The kid should have talked it a supervisor, because any teacher should be able to look beyond their own ignorance of the subject of a student's project and instead ask questions about the thought process the student used in making their project, and given a grade based on that.
- Jach 15y ago
  I thought the same. But then I thought that a supervisor is probably going to understand even less than the teacher, which just biases them even more to siding with the teacher. It's hard enough to get people on your side when they don't understand what you know; it's even harder when they don't even understand how you could possibly understand. That said I don't think he couldn't have done better. I don't think I'd have done the tedium of commenting every line of code; I'd rather write a script that just parsed out the doc of every function call and pasted it next to the function call.
- AlexC04 15y ago
  There are two sides to that story. There's quite a bit going on that has been left out. England's school system really doesn't work in a way that teachers can just hand out whatever grade a student "deserves". The kid was handed a syllabus, a marking scheme and told "if you do this you'll get an A". He threw out the mark scheme and did his own thing. He then tried to get an A for doing whatever the hell he wanted. I applaud him for pursuing his own interests and taking charge of his own learning - I really do - but the system doesn't allow for that. You don't hand in creative writing and expect to get a math credit. You don't hand in physics to your chemistry teacher. I wish the system in England were different. Maybe I'd still be teaching there if it were, but you're casting a lot of aspersion and judgement on a subject that you don't seem to know much about.
  - JimDabell 15y ago
    > He threw out the mark scheme and did his own thing. That's not what the article says. It says the brief was to "design and create a multimedia project", which he did. It says that most people went with Powerpoint, but it doesn't say that's what was asked of them.
patio11 15y ago
A realization I came to late in life: hypothetically supposing one has a finite number of awesome points, do not spend awesome points on activities which have negative marginal returns to awesome points, like school or many day-jobs. You could theoretically invest awesome points into making schools give positive marginal returns to awesome points, but they'll generally revert to goals they consider more important, like making sure many students graduate mostly literate and providing secure well-paying jobs to politically influential constituents.
- Jach 15y ago
  Did this realization make you do a lesser number of awesome things on average than before you had it? More? About the same? I'm just wondering if there could be a basilisk effect for someone who previously thought there were unlimited awesome points available to them, read your hypothetical, started believing in finite awesome points and hoarding them, and stopped doing as many awesome things as they used to.
  - patio11 15y ago
    We're getting a little into the realm of the absurd when asking for auditable metrics about expenditure of anything called awesome points, but my subjective experience is that my life, my output, and my impact on the world went way up when I spent less effort on one or two big timesucks that just profoundly did not matter.
    - droithomme 15y ago
      What was the second one? I know you quit your job to focus on your startups. Was there a previous time you left school as well or was it something else? (I agree with all you are saying in this thread, BTW - I dropped out of high school myself when I realized both that I could, and it was wasting precious hours I could use doing more useful things. I won't say I advocate this for everyone, but it's definitely the right choice for many kids who are learning on their own already and are just spinning their wheels with the sorts of shallow coverage of topics taught by non-experts that secondary schools offer.)
estel 15y ago
It's a separate but related problem that ICT in UK schools is unequivocally not about any sort of programming or software development, and very much focussed only on teaching pupils how to use the various components of Microsoft Office. Arguably, this is more relevant for the majority of people, but these are easily skills that can be incorporated into other classes where relevant, and the complete dearth of programming remains a crying, crying shame.
- arethuza 15y ago
  What are these "UK schools"? From what I can tell the Scottish courses do include development. Here are some past exam papers and coursework: http://www.sqa.org.uk/pastpapers/findpastpaper.htm?subject=Computing http://www.sqa.org.uk/pastpapers/findpastpaper.htm?subject=C...
  - stuaxo 15y ago
    Pretty sure that the Scottish education system is different
  - calpaterson 15y ago
    "Computing" is not the same as "ICT" as a subject. Though it's true the that Scottish Higher system is almost uniformly better than the English and Welsh "A" Levels/GCSEs, there is also something resembling Computer Science on the latter's curriculum ("Computing"). Here it is (for the AQA board): http://web.aqa.org.uk/qual/gce/ict/computing_noticeboard.php?id=04&prev=04 http://web.aqa.org.uk/qual/gce/ict/computing_noticeboard.php... The trouble is, and this is true of all areas of the UK, is that the Computer course is not offered and "ICT" is offered instead. ICT is the "Microsoft Office" qualification that people are referring to. If you're 16-18 and want to study "Computing", chances are that your school doesn't offer it or the staffing is painfully poor. At my university, a few years ago, there were only a tiny handful of people who'd taken a good quality course in Computer Science in college or sixth form.
    - fanf2 15y ago
      This is exactly the problem. If you want to get involved in promoting computing at school (rather than ICT) have a look at http://www.computingatschool.org.uk/ http://www.computingatschool.org.uk/
JoeAltmaier 15y ago
Similar experience in US school. Took IBM assembler class. 1st assignment: divide two numbers, assert, get dump and mark on dump where result of division was stored. Instead I wrote a macro-driven RPN calculator. Did some fancy math, printed the RPN stack at every step, exited cleanly. Got the paper back - red X, you have 2 days to turn in the requested assignment. Needless to say I did the absolute minimum for that instructor for the remainder of the term. She got what she wanted - a drone student showing absolutely no initiative (at least in her class)
- Gormo 15y ago
  I had experiences like this too - and I think it's not that the teachers expect 'drone students' as much as they are drone teachers themselves, lacking in either a deep understanding of the subject they teach or any real motivating interest to examine submitted work on its own merits. Your teacher just went for the textbook approach here.
- CPlatypus 15y ago
  The instructor was correct: you didn't complete the assignment. Printing the stack (i.e. from within the code) is not the same as finding where a value is stored in a dump (i.e. when the code stopped running and might not even be available). What you did is arguably a lot more advanced and required a lot more skill than the assignment, but even the best philosophy essay shouldn't get you an A in a history class. The mistake here is thinking that college is about demonstrating initiative only in class. Classes are just the structured part of the educational process, but the whole college environment is set up for there to be an unstructured part as well. If you have that much energy and talent, do something outside of class but in that environment like Gates and Brin and Zuckerberg did.
  - JoeAltmaier 15y ago
    Sure, but if you had a bright student, and they wildly exceeded the assignment parameters, what would your response be? Nurture the student? Encourage their talent? Enlist them in mentoring? Or mark the assignment wrong, return it unexamined, dismiss the effort.
anons2011 15y ago
ICT in UK schools, or England in particular is a bit of a joke (Especially at GCSE or A level) It was all about Frontpage and Access as well as Flash :/ It would be much better if they taught basic programming. C, Java etc. Or even focussed on web developed in PHP, as well as the front-end side of things HTML/CSS/jQuery (And teach them about semantics and accessibility! not table based rubbish generated in Dreamweaver) As well as getting people used to using an IDE rather than Dreamweaver. I think if they focused it more towards Comp sci, and less about making slideshows it would encourage alot more people to experience, and maybe create something awesome. At the time I thought all you need to do to become an IT teacher was be proficient in Office :P
- robgough 15y ago
  I'm 26 now, so this is ten years ago, but back then it was not uncommon for me or one of my friends to be the ones unofficially actually teaching the IT courses. I've heard the same story from others the same age as me. I avoided ICT GCSE for exactly this reason - and did something "fun" instead (Music for anyone interested), but I've many friends who weren't so lucky.
Tichy 15y ago
What kind of multimedia project is that? Wouldn't a teacher be more specific about what to implement and what tools to use? That story sounds kind of silly...
DevX101 15y ago
Unfortunately, the sad truth is that market forces will dictate that there are few competent programming instructors for high school. If you're good enough to teach and critique real programming projects, you're also good enough to get a job paying at least twice as much as a teacher. For the teachers not necessarily motivated by money, they would probably prefer become university professors where they can do research and work at the cutting edge. I'll make the guess that most of us here were self-taught to a large degree. Therefore, the realistic solution to the problem is probably not to get better teachers (which you can't do, since you won't pay them what they're worth). But to connect students to learn from each other. Exactly what the author of this post is doing.
- 3pt14159 15y ago
  So it is non-market forces then. In a real education market teachers wouldn't have a salary that is function of time, but of the resolution of supply and demand. Parents, knowing that their child is interested in attending a school with a solid programming platform would pay more to schools that diverted resources towards this area. Those schools would be encouraged to locate competent teachers which they would do so with a combination of increased salary and possibly increased research time (or startup hacking time).
  - DannoHung 15y ago
    That's assuming parents value their child's interest correctly rather than using their own set of assumptions about value. For non-college education, it's almost a guarantee that the consumer of the education product is not the purchaser.
  - jseliger 15y ago
    "In a real education market teachers wouldn't have a salary that is function of time, but of the resolution of supply and demand." That's true, but teachers' unions demand that, with very few exceptions, all teachers with x years of experience be paid the same amount, regardless of discipline or skill. I wrote about this issue some in "Are teachers underpaid? It depends": http://jseliger.com/2011/07/10/are-teachers-underpaid-it-depends http://jseliger.com/2011/07/10/are-teachers-underpaid-it-dep..., since I don't think one can address the issue of "teacher" compensation without looking at teacher expertise and opportunity costs.
ZenJosh 15y ago
Some context: First, I most definitely do not think I'm God's gift to man. Ive seen kids with skills leagues ahead of my own who are true masters, my skills in comparison are basic. Before I started the assessment, I asked for the mark scheme to make sure my project hit the criteria for a passing grade. We weren't asked to build in powerpoint, but most opted to do so for lack of a better option. I asked if it would be a good idea to build an iPhone app for the assessment and the teacher of my class said "Sure if you can, give it a shot". I have no idea when the teacher became aware that the project would fail but at no point was a concern raised with me until final marking. I didn't build a complex project 'just to be different', I instead thought "Well here's an opportunity to learn to do something I didn't know how to do before". Id been developing web things for a while but hadn't dipped into native code up until that point
- politician 15y ago
  The problem isn't that you did a far better job than the drones you go to class with, or that the teacher doesn't really actually know the material they're required to teach, or that the politics of the system dictate that a marking scheme exists that is as unimaginative as it is explicit. No, the problem is that as an autodidact 16 year old in a government run public school, you have a very limited if nonexistent ability to discover that fact. Take solace in this F, and know that you have a disfunction that public schools and universities are mostly ill-equipped to handle -- the ability to learn for yourself. Take patio11's advice: don't spend your awesome points on tasks that are ultimately unimportant. Or as some dudes from way back said, "don't give your pearls to swine lest they trample it and then turn on you."
  - pjscott 15y ago
    > Take patio11's advice: don't spend your awesome points on tasks that are ultimately unimportant. Or as some dudes from way back said, "don't give your pearls to swine lest they trample it and then turn on you." Isn't that exactly what he did? Instead of wasting time on a crap project that wouldn't teach him anything, he decided to learn something new and interesting. Combine that with the ability to shrug off the occasional poor grade from a clueless teacher, and you've got a powerful combination for winning school.
drivingmenuts 15y ago
This is a universal problem: teachers who are actually technically brilliant within their area of competence can't get paid enough to make it worthwhile to teach, nor will they be valued enough to make it mentally and emotionally rewarding. The sobering reality is that most people really are just average and spending the kind of money to attract truly brilliant minds to enlighten the small percentage of young geniuses therein probably can't be justified by any politically acceptable means.
- Daniel_Newby 15y ago
  > ... spending the kind of money to attract truly brilliant minds to enlighten the small percentage of young geniuses therein probably can't be justified ... Many American states run boarding schools for this purpose. Some have a complete school during the regular school year, some have summer programs for students who are not deranged overachievers, and some have both.
- gaius 15y ago
  Teachers in the UK are generously paid (when you include their gold-plated final-salary pension scheme, and unparalleled job security) and get 75 days vacation a year.
gyom 15y ago
Having studied maths and computer science, I've seen something happen like that in both fields. In a real analysis class, we were asked to give an example of an irrational number, without proof. My friend wrote "sin(1)" and, even though we were all convinced that it was correct, the teacher felt that it was a bit too "clever". My friend should have gone with the old sqrt(2), but he decided to be a little more original. The teaching basically told us to prove the claim, at home, and to find a convincing argument. Then he went back to the exam and gave my friend the points that he deserved. It's not that he couldn't prove the thing himself, it's that he didn't feel like wasting his time because of some student's funny answer.
- dxbydt 15y ago
  Just a nit - sin(1) is transcendental ( by the Lindemann Weirstrass Theorem). All real transcendental numbers are also irrational, but the converse is not true ie. the square root of 2 is irrational but not transcendental. So I guess your teacher was just looking for a plain old irrational number and going all transcendental on him is "a bit too clever" as you put it :)
badclient 15y ago
Reminds me of the time that I wrote an essay on spam and the instructor circled the title and wrote "the food? Explain". She was an English PhD student teaching a course on computers in society.
- scott_s 15y ago
  I think that's quite different. Rather than not knowing herself what spam is, I find it more likely she was telling you to define it in case another reader does not.
FuzzyDunlop 15y ago
I can identify with this. However when I did my GCSEs and A-levels, a very large requirement of the project was the creation of a design spec and thorough documentation. The actual implementation was just one part, not the entirety. That the kid in the story says he had to go back and comment his code suggests he fell into simple trap of getting so carried away with what he wanted to do that the other major requirements were left by the wayside. I fell into the same trap when I wanted to do my database coursework with PHP and MySQL. I got so far in and realised that if I carried on, I'd never get the written work done. I did brilliantly in the exams, top marks in the class each time, but my desire to try and do something impressive brought my overall mark down. So I'm a web developer who got a C at A-level ICT. Of course since it was nearly 6 years ago when I left sixth form, and 8 when I left secondary school, the curriculum might have changed.
yock 15y ago
No teacher worth a damn would fail a student for producing something well and truly good simply because they didn't understand it. What a waste.
lobo_tuerto 15y ago
I got into a computer systems engineering major at the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico City, that was around 2000. When I took the Programming III course (language: C++) I was really excited as I had done my own research into the subject, and was expecting to use the STL, templates and what not, the problem was the teacher only allowed _programs_ that ran in TurboC++ 3.1, if it didn't ran in that IDE/Compiler well, you were out of luck and you would just get a fail. I immediately changed the course to a more open minded teacher, that indeed let us use gcc and all the things that it compiled.
fish2000 15y ago
One of the best things in this article is how the kid, in the quote wherein he describes his 11-year old experience, spells the prefix "pseudo" as "sudo" -- that one little blip of an error totally reinforces the autodidact angle of the piece way better than any explicitly expositive thing (provided the reader is also of the nerdy inclination).
- SomeCallMeTim 15y ago
  "Year 10 or 11" in the UK would be equivalent to 9th or 10th grade in the US, and 14-15 years old, not 11 years old.
  - fish2000 15y ago
    Whoops. I apologize for my characteristically American cultural buffoonery.
- ZenJosh 15y ago
  The story was written as a quick response to an email on a list, not an article for the front page of hackernews. Please excuse the obvious errors (of which I am sure there are quite a few)
  - fish2000 15y ago
    Aha I had assumed that it was an error on the part of the quotee -- this was not the case then? Either way, no judgement on my part, I'm not pedantic about such things.
    - ZenJosh 15y ago
      I was in the terminal at the time and broke my workflow to reply, I was still in 'sudo' mindset not 'pseudo' mindset -- Sorry, I just realized I misread the entire comment and assumed it hostile, my bad!
SagelyGuru 15y ago
I used to do admissions interviews for computer science at a UK university. Some applicants liked to boast about their A grades in ICT. My usual response to this was: "err, ok, I won't hold it against you".
dotBen 15y ago
I took my GCSE IS (Information Systems, IE 'computing'/whatever) in 1998. I remember failing the mock examination because I kept making reference to the Internet, World Wide Web, etc in my answers and I was told that as our syllabus pre-dated the Internet I was not able to use it as an example even though I was correct. I was encouraged to use "Prestel" (if anyone remembers that) as an example of an interactive system via modem rather than the Internet. :/ For 'fun' I also completed A Level Computing in 3 months at an evening school (usually you would learn it over 2 years) just to prove I could do it. I got an overall B because I couldn't complete all of the coursework in 3 months, but aced the exam. If I ever have kids and raise them back home in the UK, I'll teach them ICT/Computing/whatever myself and encourage them to take something else that I can't teach them personally (like Drama, Music, etc)
jiggy2011 15y ago
From what I remember GCSE ICT is a complete waste of time. All we learned was how to add clipart to a MS Word Document and how to use some weird proprietary non relational database system. We also had to know something about the data protection act (I think , it was such a waste of time I never bothered to goto the exam). If you want to do university Comp Sci you will not need this qualification at all, just skip the classes and concentrate on maths , science and english. If you just want an "intro to using computers" course, there is better stuff on youtube. Of course it could have improved since my day but this article doesn't make it sound like it has.
itsnotvalid 15y ago
I think the problem lays down on the face that failing grades are given to work that are beyond the skills of the marker, is just plain wrong. If you know that they are not cheating (plagiarism or finding someone else to do) and the end result is so good, a failing grade is simply unacceptable. Luckily my ICT teacher didn't mark by reading code.
speleding 15y ago
If the purpose of schools is to teach 90% of the students to comply as accurately as possible with the orders they are given then this is a success. This is what businesses expect from the 90% when they enter the work force. If the purpose of schools is to encourage the 10% free thinkers to explore and grow then this is utter failure. It's hard to reconcile both views in one school system, but I wish we'd err on the side of the 10%. Those are the ones who will make a difference.

104 points by robinhouston 15y ago

ICT appears to mean "Information and Communications Technologies" something I didn’t know. Also man is that a depressing story.

Tibbes 15y ago
Brief summary of computing in UK schools: Back in the days of the BBC Micro, computing in schools involved some programming. After that (probably in the early nineties), the subject split into two: Computer Science and IT. Then with the rise of the internet IT was renamed CIT (Communications and Information Techologies) and finally reordered to ICT. Computer Science was also renamed Computing at some stage. ICT involves no or extremely minimal programming. Computing does, but it has proved the less popular option and died out in the majority of schools - partly due to an uninspiring syllabus and lack of teachers.
- ElliotH 15y ago
  There is in fact a Computer Science GCSE and A level which is distinct from Computing. The A level computing syllabus (haven taken it myself) is quite dated, but one of the two papers does involve some writing of pseudocode, and the coursework is a programming project with lots of freedom (as well as a bucketload of documentation writing)
  - estel 15y ago
    Really? I'd never heard of them, and a quick Google doesn't find any Computer Science GCSE or A-level that isn't a colloquial reference to the Computing A level.
    - ElliotH 15y ago
      Its anecdotal, but I know a few people who definitely claim to have taken 'Computer Science' as opposed to 'Computing' A levels.
  - seabee 15y ago
    As someone who did take the Computing A-level this is exactly it. I also took the lesson on writing some simple ASP - the teacher (who was the headmaster, oddly enough) knew his limitations and knew enough about me to entrust that particular lesson to. But it would be a ludicrous prospect in any other subject!
- arethuza 15y ago
  Please stop saying "UK schools" - the education system in some parts of the UK is completely different to England's.
- AlexC04 15y ago
  Worse than that, difficult courses have much lower pass rates and scores. Teaching them is risking your standing on the league tables. It also precludes your ability to teach the 4 credit GCSE in ICT which (at my last school) got a 100% pass rate. If you funnel every kid in your school through a course on which 100% of them get 4 GCSE credits and target measure on the league tables is percentage of students who get 5 GCSEs, then you're going to do it. Remember, funding, promotions and everything else is based on your standing on the league tables. No. Actually Teaching programming in your computer classes is a recipe for failure.
  - lhnz 15y ago
    It would be interesting if somebody was to create a League Tables Redux with weighted standings dependent on (a) number of people passing a course and (b) popularity of subject with upper-league employers/universities.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

roel_v 15y ago

It's stories like this where I would like to see a more 'journalistic' approach, i.e. hearing both sides of a story. I have a hard time believing a teacher would simply put an 'F' on a project because, even though he's seen it running on the phones of his colleagues, he would say 'I don't understand how it works so I'll just fail it'. On the other hand, I have no such qualms believing a version where a 16 year old who thinks he's God's gift to mankind (hey, I was one of those) puts something together that doesn't fit the requirements of the project, submits it despite being repeatedly being steered in a different direction, comes up with unrealistic readings and interpretations of the assignment or context of the class to get them to fit his world view, and then (even if he does get a passing mark in the end) complains to everybody who will listen about how he's being discriminated against and how much smarter than everybody else he is, and oh I'm so wasting my time here between all these morons. I've been that student in an eerily similar situation, although I was 18 at the time and it was Jave Applets which were a hot new thing back then, and if I would have been my teacher at the time, I would've failed me, too (although the one I actually had did too give me a passing mark out of pittance). In short, sounds like biased view, happily accepted by the author to 'prove' his pet peeve (a pretty marginal one, for that matter), but devoid of real value or content.

alextgordon 15y ago
> It's stories like this where I would like to see a more 'journalistic' approach, i.e. hearing both sides of a story. I have a hard time believing a teacher would simply put an 'F' on a project because, even though he's seen it running on the phones of his colleagues, he would say 'I don't understand how it works so I'll just fail it'. You have to understand how the system works in the UK. From ages 15-18, there are ~4 years of exams, preparation for exams, that kind of thing. Ultimately these exams are mostly meaningless, their main purpose is to get you a place at university (which is only 3 years, go figure). The exams are set by these big official exam boards. Now during this time, the teachers aren't going to be thinking "Does this deserve an A", they're going to be thinking "Would an examiner give this an A". The exam boards circulate marking schemes. If it doesn't meet the criteria sufficiently (has the candidate demonstrated with this that they know the difference between a file and a folder in this project?), it's not going to be given an A, regardless of merit. I've had teachers explain to me that otherwise A-quality projects have been given low marks because they were written in C++ instead of VB6.

robterrell 15y ago

This is a enormous failure of the teacher. The kid should have talked it a supervisor, because any teacher should be able to look beyond their own ignorance of the subject of a student's project and instead ask questions about the thought process the student used in making their project, and given a grade based on that.

Jach 15y ago
I thought the same. But then I thought that a supervisor is probably going to understand even less than the teacher, which just biases them even more to siding with the teacher. It's hard enough to get people on your side when they don't understand what you know; it's even harder when they don't even understand how you could possibly understand. That said I don't think he couldn't have done better. I don't think I'd have done the tedium of commenting every line of code; I'd rather write a script that just parsed out the doc of every function call and pasted it next to the function call.
AlexC04 15y ago
There are two sides to that story. There's quite a bit going on that has been left out. England's school system really doesn't work in a way that teachers can just hand out whatever grade a student "deserves". The kid was handed a syllabus, a marking scheme and told "if you do this you'll get an A". He threw out the mark scheme and did his own thing. He then tried to get an A for doing whatever the hell he wanted. I applaud him for pursuing his own interests and taking charge of his own learning - I really do - but the system doesn't allow for that. You don't hand in creative writing and expect to get a math credit. You don't hand in physics to your chemistry teacher. I wish the system in England were different. Maybe I'd still be teaching there if it were, but you're casting a lot of aspersion and judgement on a subject that you don't seem to know much about.
- JimDabell 15y ago
  > He threw out the mark scheme and did his own thing. That's not what the article says. It says the brief was to "design and create a multimedia project", which he did. It says that most people went with Powerpoint, but it doesn't say that's what was asked of them.

patio11 15y ago

A realization I came to late in life: hypothetically supposing one has a finite number of awesome points, do not spend awesome points on activities which have negative marginal returns to awesome points, like school or many day-jobs. You could theoretically invest awesome points into making schools give positive marginal returns to awesome points, but they'll generally revert to goals they consider more important, like making sure many students graduate mostly literate and providing secure well-paying jobs to politically influential constituents.

Jach 15y ago
Did this realization make you do a lesser number of awesome things on average than before you had it? More? About the same? I'm just wondering if there could be a basilisk effect for someone who previously thought there were unlimited awesome points available to them, read your hypothetical, started believing in finite awesome points and hoarding them, and stopped doing as many awesome things as they used to.
- patio11 15y ago
  We're getting a little into the realm of the absurd when asking for auditable metrics about expenditure of anything called awesome points, but my subjective experience is that my life, my output, and my impact on the world went way up when I spent less effort on one or two big timesucks that just profoundly did not matter.
  - droithomme 15y ago
    What was the second one? I know you quit your job to focus on your startups. Was there a previous time you left school as well or was it something else? (I agree with all you are saying in this thread, BTW - I dropped out of high school myself when I realized both that I could, and it was wasting precious hours I could use doing more useful things. I won't say I advocate this for everyone, but it's definitely the right choice for many kids who are learning on their own already and are just spinning their wheels with the sorts of shallow coverage of topics taught by non-experts that secondary schools offer.)

estel 15y ago

It's a separate but related problem that ICT in UK schools is unequivocally not about any sort of programming or software development, and very much focussed only on teaching pupils how to use the various components of Microsoft Office. Arguably, this is more relevant for the majority of people, but these are easily skills that can be incorporated into other classes where relevant, and the complete dearth of programming remains a crying, crying shame.

arethuza 15y ago
What are these "UK schools"? From what I can tell the Scottish courses do include development. Here are some past exam papers and coursework: http://www.sqa.org.uk/pastpapers/findpastpaper.htm?subject=Computing http://www.sqa.org.uk/pastpapers/findpastpaper.htm?subject=C...
- stuaxo 15y ago
  Pretty sure that the Scottish education system is different
- calpaterson 15y ago
  "Computing" is not the same as "ICT" as a subject. Though it's true the that Scottish Higher system is almost uniformly better than the English and Welsh "A" Levels/GCSEs, there is also something resembling Computer Science on the latter's curriculum ("Computing"). Here it is (for the AQA board): http://web.aqa.org.uk/qual/gce/ict/computing_noticeboard.php?id=04&prev=04 http://web.aqa.org.uk/qual/gce/ict/computing_noticeboard.php... The trouble is, and this is true of all areas of the UK, is that the Computer course is not offered and "ICT" is offered instead. ICT is the "Microsoft Office" qualification that people are referring to. If you're 16-18 and want to study "Computing", chances are that your school doesn't offer it or the staffing is painfully poor. At my university, a few years ago, there were only a tiny handful of people who'd taken a good quality course in Computer Science in college or sixth form.
  - fanf2 15y ago
    This is exactly the problem. If you want to get involved in promoting computing at school (rather than ICT) have a look at http://www.computingatschool.org.uk/ http://www.computingatschool.org.uk/

JoeAltmaier 15y ago

Similar experience in US school. Took IBM assembler class. 1st assignment: divide two numbers, assert, get dump and mark on dump where result of division was stored. Instead I wrote a macro-driven RPN calculator. Did some fancy math, printed the RPN stack at every step, exited cleanly. Got the paper back - red X, you have 2 days to turn in the requested assignment. Needless to say I did the absolute minimum for that instructor for the remainder of the term. She got what she wanted - a drone student showing absolutely no initiative (at least in her class)

Gormo 15y ago
I had experiences like this too - and I think it's not that the teachers expect 'drone students' as much as they are drone teachers themselves, lacking in either a deep understanding of the subject they teach or any real motivating interest to examine submitted work on its own merits. Your teacher just went for the textbook approach here.
CPlatypus 15y ago
The instructor was correct: you didn't complete the assignment. Printing the stack (i.e. from within the code) is not the same as finding where a value is stored in a dump (i.e. when the code stopped running and might not even be available). What you did is arguably a lot more advanced and required a lot more skill than the assignment, but even the best philosophy essay shouldn't get you an A in a history class. The mistake here is thinking that college is about demonstrating initiative only in class. Classes are just the structured part of the educational process, but the whole college environment is set up for there to be an unstructured part as well. If you have that much energy and talent, do something outside of class but in that environment like Gates and Brin and Zuckerberg did.
- JoeAltmaier 15y ago
  Sure, but if you had a bright student, and they wildly exceeded the assignment parameters, what would your response be? Nurture the student? Encourage their talent? Enlist them in mentoring? Or mark the assignment wrong, return it unexamined, dismiss the effort.

anons2011 15y ago

ICT in UK schools, or England in particular is a bit of a joke (Especially at GCSE or A level) It was all about Frontpage and Access as well as Flash :/ It would be much better if they taught basic programming. C, Java etc. Or even focussed on web developed in PHP, as well as the front-end side of things HTML/CSS/jQuery (And teach them about semantics and accessibility! not table based rubbish generated in Dreamweaver) As well as getting people used to using an IDE rather than Dreamweaver. I think if they focused it more towards Comp sci, and less about making slideshows it would encourage alot more people to experience, and maybe create something awesome. At the time I thought all you need to do to become an IT teacher was be proficient in Office :P

robgough 15y ago
I'm 26 now, so this is ten years ago, but back then it was not uncommon for me or one of my friends to be the ones unofficially actually teaching the IT courses. I've heard the same story from others the same age as me. I avoided ICT GCSE for exactly this reason - and did something "fun" instead (Music for anyone interested), but I've many friends who weren't so lucky.

Tichy 15y ago

What kind of multimedia project is that? Wouldn't a teacher be more specific about what to implement and what tools to use? That story sounds kind of silly...

DevX101 15y ago

Unfortunately, the sad truth is that market forces will dictate that there are few competent programming instructors for high school. If you're good enough to teach and critique real programming projects, you're also good enough to get a job paying at least twice as much as a teacher. For the teachers not necessarily motivated by money, they would probably prefer become university professors where they can do research and work at the cutting edge. I'll make the guess that most of us here were self-taught to a large degree. Therefore, the realistic solution to the problem is probably not to get better teachers (which you can't do, since you won't pay them what they're worth). But to connect students to learn from each other. Exactly what the author of this post is doing.

3pt14159 15y ago
So it is non-market forces then. In a real education market teachers wouldn't have a salary that is function of time, but of the resolution of supply and demand. Parents, knowing that their child is interested in attending a school with a solid programming platform would pay more to schools that diverted resources towards this area. Those schools would be encouraged to locate competent teachers which they would do so with a combination of increased salary and possibly increased research time (or startup hacking time).
- DannoHung 15y ago
  That's assuming parents value their child's interest correctly rather than using their own set of assumptions about value. For non-college education, it's almost a guarantee that the consumer of the education product is not the purchaser.
- jseliger 15y ago
  "In a real education market teachers wouldn't have a salary that is function of time, but of the resolution of supply and demand." That's true, but teachers' unions demand that, with very few exceptions, all teachers with x years of experience be paid the same amount, regardless of discipline or skill. I wrote about this issue some in "Are teachers underpaid? It depends": http://jseliger.com/2011/07/10/are-teachers-underpaid-it-depends http://jseliger.com/2011/07/10/are-teachers-underpaid-it-dep..., since I don't think one can address the issue of "teacher" compensation without looking at teacher expertise and opportunity costs.

ZenJosh 15y ago

Some context: First, I most definitely do not think I'm God's gift to man. Ive seen kids with skills leagues ahead of my own who are true masters, my skills in comparison are basic. Before I started the assessment, I asked for the mark scheme to make sure my project hit the criteria for a passing grade. We weren't asked to build in powerpoint, but most opted to do so for lack of a better option. I asked if it would be a good idea to build an iPhone app for the assessment and the teacher of my class said "Sure if you can, give it a shot". I have no idea when the teacher became aware that the project would fail but at no point was a concern raised with me until final marking. I didn't build a complex project 'just to be different', I instead thought "Well here's an opportunity to learn to do something I didn't know how to do before". Id been developing web things for a while but hadn't dipped into native code up until that point

politician 15y ago
The problem isn't that you did a far better job than the drones you go to class with, or that the teacher doesn't really actually know the material they're required to teach, or that the politics of the system dictate that a marking scheme exists that is as unimaginative as it is explicit. No, the problem is that as an autodidact 16 year old in a government run public school, you have a very limited if nonexistent ability to discover that fact. Take solace in this F, and know that you have a disfunction that public schools and universities are mostly ill-equipped to handle -- the ability to learn for yourself. Take patio11's advice: don't spend your awesome points on tasks that are ultimately unimportant. Or as some dudes from way back said, "don't give your pearls to swine lest they trample it and then turn on you."
- pjscott 15y ago
  > Take patio11's advice: don't spend your awesome points on tasks that are ultimately unimportant. Or as some dudes from way back said, "don't give your pearls to swine lest they trample it and then turn on you." Isn't that exactly what he did? Instead of wasting time on a crap project that wouldn't teach him anything, he decided to learn something new and interesting. Combine that with the ability to shrug off the occasional poor grade from a clueless teacher, and you've got a powerful combination for winning school.

drivingmenuts 15y ago

This is a universal problem: teachers who are actually technically brilliant within their area of competence can't get paid enough to make it worthwhile to teach, nor will they be valued enough to make it mentally and emotionally rewarding. The sobering reality is that most people really are just average and spending the kind of money to attract truly brilliant minds to enlighten the small percentage of young geniuses therein probably can't be justified by any politically acceptable means.

Daniel_Newby 15y ago
> ... spending the kind of money to attract truly brilliant minds to enlighten the small percentage of young geniuses therein probably can't be justified ... Many American states run boarding schools for this purpose. Some have a complete school during the regular school year, some have summer programs for students who are not deranged overachievers, and some have both.
gaius 15y ago
Teachers in the UK are generously paid (when you include their gold-plated final-salary pension scheme, and unparalleled job security) and get 75 days vacation a year.

gyom 15y ago

Having studied maths and computer science, I've seen something happen like that in both fields. In a real analysis class, we were asked to give an example of an irrational number, without proof. My friend wrote "sin(1)" and, even though we were all convinced that it was correct, the teacher felt that it was a bit too "clever". My friend should have gone with the old sqrt(2), but he decided to be a little more original. The teaching basically told us to prove the claim, at home, and to find a convincing argument. Then he went back to the exam and gave my friend the points that he deserved. It's not that he couldn't prove the thing himself, it's that he didn't feel like wasting his time because of some student's funny answer.

dxbydt 15y ago
Just a nit - sin(1) is transcendental ( by the Lindemann Weirstrass Theorem). All real transcendental numbers are also irrational, but the converse is not true ie. the square root of 2 is irrational but not transcendental. So I guess your teacher was just looking for a plain old irrational number and going all transcendental on him is "a bit too clever" as you put it :)

badclient 15y ago

Reminds me of the time that I wrote an essay on spam and the instructor circled the title and wrote "the food? Explain". She was an English PhD student teaching a course on computers in society.

scott_s 15y ago
I think that's quite different. Rather than not knowing herself what spam is, I find it more likely she was telling you to define it in case another reader does not.

FuzzyDunlop 15y ago

I can identify with this. However when I did my GCSEs and A-levels, a very large requirement of the project was the creation of a design spec and thorough documentation. The actual implementation was just one part, not the entirety. That the kid in the story says he had to go back and comment his code suggests he fell into simple trap of getting so carried away with what he wanted to do that the other major requirements were left by the wayside. I fell into the same trap when I wanted to do my database coursework with PHP and MySQL. I got so far in and realised that if I carried on, I'd never get the written work done. I did brilliantly in the exams, top marks in the class each time, but my desire to try and do something impressive brought my overall mark down. So I'm a web developer who got a C at A-level ICT. Of course since it was nearly 6 years ago when I left sixth form, and 8 when I left secondary school, the curriculum might have changed.

yock 15y ago

No teacher worth a damn would fail a student for producing something well and truly good simply because they didn't understand it. What a waste.

lobo_tuerto 15y ago

I got into a computer systems engineering major at the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico City, that was around 2000. When I took the Programming III course (language: C++) I was really excited as I had done my own research into the subject, and was expecting to use the STL, templates and what not, the problem was the teacher only allowed _programs_ that ran in TurboC++ 3.1, if it didn't ran in that IDE/Compiler well, you were out of luck and you would just get a fail. I immediately changed the course to a more open minded teacher, that indeed let us use gcc and all the things that it compiled.

fish2000 15y ago

One of the best things in this article is how the kid, in the quote wherein he describes his 11-year old experience, spells the prefix "pseudo" as "sudo" -- that one little blip of an error totally reinforces the autodidact angle of the piece way better than any explicitly expositive thing (provided the reader is also of the nerdy inclination).

SomeCallMeTim 15y ago
"Year 10 or 11" in the UK would be equivalent to 9th or 10th grade in the US, and 14-15 years old, not 11 years old.
- fish2000 15y ago
  Whoops. I apologize for my characteristically American cultural buffoonery.
ZenJosh 15y ago
The story was written as a quick response to an email on a list, not an article for the front page of hackernews. Please excuse the obvious errors (of which I am sure there are quite a few)
- fish2000 15y ago
  Aha I had assumed that it was an error on the part of the quotee -- this was not the case then? Either way, no judgement on my part, I'm not pedantic about such things.
  - ZenJosh 15y ago
    I was in the terminal at the time and broke my workflow to reply, I was still in 'sudo' mindset not 'pseudo' mindset -- Sorry, I just realized I misread the entire comment and assumed it hostile, my bad!

SagelyGuru 15y ago

I used to do admissions interviews for computer science at a UK university. Some applicants liked to boast about their A grades in ICT. My usual response to this was: "err, ok, I won't hold it against you".

dotBen 15y ago

I took my GCSE IS (Information Systems, IE 'computing'/whatever) in 1998. I remember failing the mock examination because I kept making reference to the Internet, World Wide Web, etc in my answers and I was told that as our syllabus pre-dated the Internet I was not able to use it as an example even though I was correct. I was encouraged to use "Prestel" (if anyone remembers that) as an example of an interactive system via modem rather than the Internet. :/ For 'fun' I also completed A Level Computing in 3 months at an evening school (usually you would learn it over 2 years) just to prove I could do it. I got an overall B because I couldn't complete all of the coursework in 3 months, but aced the exam. If I ever have kids and raise them back home in the UK, I'll teach them ICT/Computing/whatever myself and encourage them to take something else that I can't teach them personally (like Drama, Music, etc)

jiggy2011 15y ago

From what I remember GCSE ICT is a complete waste of time. All we learned was how to add clipart to a MS Word Document and how to use some weird proprietary non relational database system. We also had to know something about the data protection act (I think , it was such a waste of time I never bothered to goto the exam). If you want to do university Comp Sci you will not need this qualification at all, just skip the classes and concentrate on maths , science and english. If you just want an "intro to using computers" course, there is better stuff on youtube. Of course it could have improved since my day but this article doesn't make it sound like it has.

itsnotvalid 15y ago

I think the problem lays down on the face that failing grades are given to work that are beyond the skills of the marker, is just plain wrong. If you know that they are not cheating (plagiarism or finding someone else to do) and the end result is so good, a failing grade is simply unacceptable. Luckily my ICT teacher didn't mark by reading code.

speleding 15y ago

If the purpose of schools is to teach 90% of the students to comply as accurately as possible with the orders they are given then this is a success. This is what businesses expect from the 90% when they enter the work force. If the purpose of schools is to encourage the 10% free thinkers to explore and grow then this is utter failure. It's hard to reconcile both views in one school system, but I wish we'd err on the side of the 10%. Those are the ones who will make a difference.