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.
> 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.
Is an example of one marking scheme that I found (on a quick search).
See page 7 and notice that the requirement is that the student "identify" on a scale of 5 marks
- A clear statement of the problem, giving some background detail and identifying user(s)
- Consideration of possible alternative solutions with
adequate justification given for the chosen method
- Quantitative objectives or user requirement
Now if a student just goes out and makes a mobile app that doesn't cover any of the requirements so for the above section I'd have been forced to give a 0.
The UK school system has a number of very deep, systematic problems that are preventing it from delivering a good education in IT.
It's a shame, it's frustrating and it's not going to change any time soon.
One thing I had drummed into me in my UK ICT education (admittedly 15 years ago and it wasn't called ICT then) was that we were aiming at fulfilling client desires; that we shouldn't just go off and produce something cool, if it wasn't of use to the described and defined end user (who we had a great amount of freedom to select) and we couldn't objectively justify our development approach, it wasn't good enough.
Now, I can't say I object to a marking scheme that requires students to learn to develop what is useful and efficient rather than just what is cool...
I would much rather kids make stuff that is cool, rather than stuff that is useful. They have 60 years after they leave school to make useful stuff (probably for other people).
There was a strong software engineering and project management streak to the course when I was on it; you were taught that code was written for a purpose and for an end user, and that you should be aiming at that target. You could have written a game or a graphics demo if you could have justified it, but you had to actually produce what you could argue somebody wanted.
Frankly, for a relatively vocational course, I think that was the right balance. If they want to play then let them but teach them the discipline of producing to a spec too.
I agree with you 100%, and from an educational and learning theory perspective that's the way to go. Something that is engaging, interesting, exciting and cool is highly motivating and therefore has a much greater chance of being able to "sneak in" the learning while the kids think they're just having a bit of fun.
Unfortunately, that's now how it works in England. It's completely bass-ackwards and all performance and learning has to be measured so that it can be inspected, compared to others' and reported on.
Unless there is a political "sea change" in England with respect to this issue, your "preference" is worthless. Edexcel, is a private publisher who writes the exams, and sells the textbooks and makes millions of pounds a year on the system as is. Inspection and Regulation can be billed at a tremendous markup and it pays for a lot of lobbyists.
Unions in England were broken by Thatcher, so the 3 (4?) teacher's unions (yes, plural) are powerless to lobby against the system ... in a brilliant case of divide and conquer, they spend as much time arguing amongst themselves as lobbying for teacher's right to be trusted.
The office of inspection of schools has a motto of something like "Better education through inspection" ... how disjointed is that? Not through "instruction" or "enjoyment" or "making cool stuff" but "inspection"
Sorry ... your preference is irrelevant.
I feel very passionately about that, every day they're failing their children and they can do so much better.
It's a large part of the reason I've quit teaching but, Que Sera right?
I've had my project graded one mark lower (even thought it was more cool and had more features than projects other people submited), because there was no documentation, and no easy way to install it.
Now I think I should go and give flowers to that teacher :)
Your teacher was 'compensating' the feature set and creativity against the lack of documentation, a trade off.
The point that was made above was that in the UK we as teachers don't have that leeway. We have to grade according to criteria for different aspects of the assignment.
I would have made you put a proposal form in first explaining your feature set, and why you needed those features or what they added to your project. If we had to, that proposal would become the documentation!
Fair enough. The story wasn't about getting a A or not though; it was about the student being failed initially, and the teacher (supposedly) saying he was failing the student because he (the teacher) didn't understand how it worked or even what it really was.
Look, the purpose of the project (any project) is to meet its stated evaluation criteria. Sometimes those are vague, and then the project will surely fail; sometimes (like in standardized testing) they're not, and in those cases purposely doing something contrary to the project objectives would be a sure way to get the project to fail (or, in a school test, get a failing grade).
OK, one can propose that it's a poor way of 'teaching' (and I'd mostly agree with anyone who'd take that position), or one can propose that the criteria that are used to evaluate students are wrong, or many other positions. And although I'm not intimately familiar with the UK system per se, I am with a number of systems who have similar properties (but I'm not in a position to judge how they compare to the UK system).
Still, the picture as it's being painted in the article is so one-sided as to become unbelievable. My more abstract point is: it's easy to (as an outsider) complain about teachers, government officials, workers at large companies, workers at small companies etc, but the reality is that there are many much more nuanced considerations than 'they should award points based on the real skill!' or 'they should work faster!' or 'they should be more lenient in applying policies!'.
And actually, to play the devil's advocate, I would have to agree (at least in principle) with anyone who would argue that the student's failure to understand and play by the rules alone should be reason enough to not give him an A. The project was (if I read between the lines) not 'develop something multimedia, anything you want, as cool as possible' but rather 'develop something multimedia-related taking into account the things we covered in class over the last semester', even if maybe it wasn't stated that explicitly. The successful person is not the one who will make himself a victim when he goes pseudo-lawyering (btw anyone else head to re-read the 'sudo' line a few times to understand the kid meant 'pseudo'?) to interpret the rules of the game to make them fit his definition; it's the one who has the skills to understand the explicit and implicit boundaries within which he can move. (or, by actually convincing others that his interpretation is the right one, which the kid obviously failed at, so that's a situation we can leave out of the discussion ;) )
The student in question added more information in the comments below the article, and has this to say:
>Some extra information:
>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 maintained close contact with the teacher, regularly demoed the project and all was well. 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. Again, the thought crossed my mind “If I can learn this in a week, surely they can at least have some basic understanding of it after 2 months”
>I was commenting while writing the code where I thought it necessary however, I had to go back and comment on libraries I used, on top of the comments that already existed, in basic terms
Call me cynical, to me this sounds like a story so outrageous that it becomes rather implausible. Of course it's possible that there is a teacher who for several weeks/months says 'looks good, go for it' and then out of the blue, at the end, decides to do a 180, fails the students and says 'I'm failing you because I don't understand'. But despite me knowing quite a few idiots and incompetent people, that just doesn't sound very much like something that would really happen in the way it is being painted.
Of course I don't know the student, so I'm not going to go out and say that he's a liar, either. But there is room between calling somebody a liar and word for word believing a random stranger on the internet.
Which is why I commented that in these cases, I'd prefer to hear the other side of the story, rather than using an obviously colored view as 'proof' for the article's author preconceived notions.
> Call me cynical, to me this sounds like a story so outrageous that it becomes rather implausible.
Not at all. I'm in India. I regularly score terrible marks because my teachers don't understand my projects, not even when I limit my projects to things that most college students across the world are assigned as homework.
A week ago I tried to explain to my teacher how I'm going to build a Scheme interpreter for my final year project. Now, this teacher spends about fifteen minutes talking to most students about their projects, most of which are basic CRUD apps/websites done in Java or C#. She spent all of 3 minutes with me, and then sent me on my way. All this time, she thought I was building a "steam interpreter". I'd tried really hard to explain to her what Scheme was, and I'd even shown her some example code in the Racket REPL. At the end of my explanation, she was blank.
At the end of the year, every guy with a partially-working, hacked-together ASP.NET CRUD app that he grabbed off of CodeProject is going to walk away with an 85 or a 90, and I'll score a 75 or something. This happens every semester we have a project.
Oh, and this isn't even the first time I'm getting screwed. Moreover, I'm not the only Indian kid who regularly gets screwed. The blogosphere is replete with nightmarish tales of Indian teachers screwing over students.
I don't know about the UK, but 99% of the teachers here in India are absolute shitheads who don't deserve their jobs.
And here's a little bonus for those who read this far: tomorrow, I have to explain some of the concepts behind ZFS to my teacher. Whee.
1) Write some shitty CRUD app in C# for school, and write your scheme interpreter just for fun. Don't waste your time fighting with a prof, just play the game and move on.
2) Add README files to your github projects. Some prospective employers will ignore your grades/cv and browse your github - readme files will help them.
Put the scheme interpreter here too, even if it's just a fun little project.
2) When you are looking for a job, send me an email. I'm CTO at a startup based out of Pune and NY. When you graduate we'll either be hiring or bankrupt, and in the former case we probably want to talk to you (see point 2).
I did my engineering at NIT (it was called REC when I graduated) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Institutes_of_Technolo...] and I also suffered in first two semesters because I did not play the game which others were playing just to get good grades. The focus was on grades, not learning.
Later I realized that playing game of grades is not much of an effort so why not play the game and keep doing what I love to do on the side? In my final year, I was in Top 10 students in my batch. In last two years of college, I also did freelance coding for some clients in USA which helped me pay for all my expenses (tuition/pocket money/party/vacation). When college was over and it was time to face the real world, everyone who only focused on the grades suffered and I aced the interviews, found a job which I loved and finally moved to USA.
For a example which you can relate to, see Swaroop [http://www.swaroopch.com/]. He didn't graduate from IIT but worked for Yahoo, Adobe, some Internet startup and he is finally doing freelancing and recently did some work for Joshua [http://www.swaroopch.com/blog/freelancing-for-joshua-schacht...]. He doesn't even mention his degree on his blog, he lets his work speak for itself.
So don't get discouraged, play the game but focus on your passion. Everything else will fall in place. If you want to talk, feel free to contact me. [My info is in my profile.]
> Later I realized that playing game of grades is not much of an effort so why not play the game and keep doing what I love to do on the side?
That's what I do most of the time. It's just that this once, I went a little too far and took on a task that's going to be more difficult than usual to explain to my profs.
Ah well. It's IPU. Failing at a project or practical exam is impossible here. The worst that can happen is that I score a 70 while everyone else scores a 90. I'm beyond caring at this point.
Maybe, but in this specific story, the claim is that a teacher first says it's OK, that the student followed the marking criteria he was given, that the teacher during the course of the project still said it was OK and that then, at grading time, the teacher turned around completely and all of a sudden said that he didn't understand anything about it, and therefore had to fail the student.
Many dysfunctional examples from systems across the world notwithstanding, this particular one doesn't pass the sniff test.
Not a liar. It's the exact same experience I had during ICT GCSE from 2004-2006. It's not so much a 'I'm failing you because I don't understand', it's more a 'I'm failing you because the exam board doesn't understand'.
Even building a pond liner calculator in Microsoft Excel we had to explain every single step of the process, in writing which took literally weeks in order to get the 'documentation' as they call it to A grade standard (as opposed to creating the thing which took about an hour).
I can imagine with regard to developing an iPhone application his story is 100% plausible.
What people are missing is a) The difference between ICT and Computing (especially at GCSE and A level), and also the fact that blame should be pointed at the exam boards and NOT the teachers themselves, many of whom will share your views and be commenting alongside you here. They have to legally adhere to the exam board specifications and whilst many teachers push the boundaries as far as they can (just as the teacher in this example did), it's quite clear why many don't (again - just see the example posted by Emma).
Indeed. ICT teachers have a curriculum to stick to, whether they like it or not. If that curriculum, dictated by everyone from the head of department to the local authority, says "create a crappy powerpoint app" and the student doesn't do that, then he's failed.
I remember the painful discussion I had with my lecturer at college regarding the website module on my AVCE ICT course (college level; 16-18). I had a choice: I could create a website putting everything I knew about semantics and accessibility etc into it, using valid HTML & CSS etc etc etc... or I could pass the course (using Frontpage + frames).
It's a shit system (I've seen it both sides of the fence - student and IT support) but getting teachers to the level of your average HN user just for the sake of 1 in every few hundred students is a waste of their time.
A more powerful social effect maybe, but that teacher won't keep his job. It sounds like this kid already knows what course he'll pick for uni, if he's going, and the teacher doesn't know the area at all, so can't help in any way.
* 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*
I can well believe that could have happened.
But this is inconsistant with the stated goals of most teachers, teaching groups, schools and state education policies. Most of this think that the school system, and teachers, should not be there to produce rote automatons who can only answer the given question. They claim they want to encourage independent thought, and thinking, and creativity.
If a student does well better than their peers, but it doesn't fit exactly what the assignment calls for then they should get an A for demonstrating their talent, and the system should be fixed.
You're probably right. The fact is that in order to grade assignments, there needs to be a standard. GCSE's are very simple exams - they give a qualification to people who leave school at 16, and they let people identify what areas they want to study further at A-Level or university - but they're not designed with flexibility in mind. If the person in the article wants to spend their time at home writing Objective-C and iphone apps all day long, he's welcome to - if he's as clever as he claims he is, he'll have no dearth of free time because the work load for GCSE's is relatively minimal. The smart thing to do would have been to simply follow the assignment as given (a nice simple powerpoint presentation) and get on with doing fun stuff at home.
Yes, there's a shortage of qualified computer science teachers. Yes, ICT teachers probably should understand programming to a limited extent, but currently? they don't. It's not until university that the people grading his assignments will truly be able to understand his brilliance (assuming he is as he claims...), but while I don't agree with the current state of the system, I also don't think that we should ensure that every ICT teacher in front of a class of GCSE ICT students (the majority of whom would simple be unable to write any Objective-C) should be educated in current programming fashions like iPhone development so that the one brilliant student in the class can do his coursework in it.
True, I also found it odd that he would have expected the teacher to know python or ruby. I program for a living and I've only just started looking into python and I know virtually no ruby. Although I'm sure if I had some well documented code I could figure out what it does, but I guess GCSE teachers only get limited time for marking and in most cases have to do it from home.
One thing I enjoyed about my 3rd and 4th year university units is that they stopped imposing language requirements. Hand it in, if the professor can follow it, you get marked. Otherwise he or she will call you in and you can explain it in person.
I can believe most any story of a teacher being preposterously unreasonable, though of course not all of them are true. I've had some bad experiences. But that's not what I wanted to talk about; I wanted to talk about this:
> 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.
You say that with loads of negative connotations, but when I was a grad student teaching programming, I loved it when students would do this sort of thing, because they learned so much more than they would have by sticking to the lesson plan. Of course, I actually rewarded them with good grades for going above and beyond what they had to do.
Sure, it was inconvenient for me to have students ignoring my carefully-made lesson plans. But screw my plans; classes are about the students, and I wanted each student to do as well as they could. In other words, I wanted to be the kind of teacher I had always wanted, and occasionally had. It worked out well.
Yes, as with most things, it can go both ways, and I painted a stark contrast to make my point. Sometimes better results come out of people who don't stick to what they're supposed to be doing. On the other hand, sometimes the results are worse, too. I can't say, I haven't seen the project, don't know anything about the assignment, and haven't heard any other view. This particular story though doesn't sound very plausible to me, though.
Perhaps the OP was referring more to the student who turns in a GUI made with VB for an assignment that called for a console app made with C++. "But, it's a GUI! And GUI's are way more advanced than the command line!"
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.
At school I was consistently the one who tried the "alternate" method. By which I mean; when setting a task to the class there was always a heavy suggestion of "how it should be done" or "the tool to use". Often with a "and you also might consider if you have the time..."
My approach was always to play with that alternative (which was really thrown in for us to say "we considered it" in the report :)). And as a result always used to suffer.
Sometimes because of unfinished work (but, hey, I was exploring something difficult!), or because it was unexpected. By about 16 this was massively disheartening; I've always had a deep interest in exploring a problem rather than having it laid out on a plate, but whenever I did the school frowned on it.
A lot of kids have this problem; when I teach clubs/classes now I get them expecting to be marked to a set scheme, having to hit certain keywords to get the marks.
On the face of it, sure, standardised marking has strong advantages when class teaching. But the objectives are too rigid and do not allow for individuals who are developing an understanding, rather than following the script.
The saving grace was 6th form (aged 17/18) where my Electronics teacher convinced me to try something really ambitious and explorative (for a 17 year old newbie engineer!). Mostly it went wrong - but our team got the highest marks in the class. The comment I distinctly remember being on our report(s) was: "I have no idea how you got that second part to work, but it was brilliant!"
>Sometimes because of unfinished work (but, hey, I was exploring something difficult!)
This reminded me of a passage from Cryptonomicon which has previously been quoted on HN:
"They gave him an intelligence test. The first question on the math part had to do with boats on a river: Port Smith is 100 miles upstream of Port Jones. The river flows at 5 miles per hour. The boat goes through water at 10 miles per hour. How long does it take to go from Port Smith to Port Jones? How long to come back?
Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat. Clearly, 5 miles per hour was nothing more than the average speed. The current would be faster in the middle of the river and slower at the banks. More complicated variations could be expected at bends in the river. Basically it was a question of hydrodynamics, which could be tackled using certain well-known systems of differential equations. Lawrence dove into the problem, rapidly (or so he thought) covering both sides of ten sheets of paper with calculations. Along the way, he realized that one of his assumptions, in combination with the simplified Navier-Stokes equations, had led him into an exploration of a particularly interesting family of partial differential equations. Before he knew it, he had proved a new theorem. If that didn't prove his intelligence, what would?
Then the time bell rang and the papers were collected. Lawrence managed to hang onto his scratch paper. He took it back to his dorm, typed it up, and mailed it to one of the more approachable math professors at Princeton, who promptly arranged for it to be published in a Parisian mathematics journal.
Lawrence received two free, freshly printed copies of the journal a few months later, in San Diego, California, during mail call on board a large ship called the U.S.S. Nevada. The ship had a band, and the Navy had given Lawrence the job of playing the glockenspiel in it, because their testing procedures had proven that he was not intelligent enough to do anything else."
When I'm mentoring fresh-from-school developers at work I constantly have to try to get them to think for themselves. They seem to want me to lay out the entire problem+solution and tell them (almost) exactly how I would solve it, so all that's left is for them to implement.
I try to encourage them to develop an understanding of the problem, and poke my head in for pointers/quick tips "you're doing a billing system, better have transactions for everything", rather than "You'll need these 3 tables with these 5 fields, and you'll need to surround these methods in a database level transaction"
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.
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.
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.)
I having a feeling I somehow unknowingly managed to spend a couple of awesome points at the age of 6-10 on getting a feeling for grading systems.
Like many of my friends, I often had a feeling of unfair grades being given throughout all my education. I magically always ended up on the side of the people with better marks than ability. At least that's how it felt to me.
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
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."
> 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.
My limited understanding of reading his story is that he has since graduated, emigrated to the United States because of his observation that doing awesome things is not tolerated in his homeland, released apps, and has just recently gotten VC funding and is going to Startup School.
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.
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).
"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-dep..., since I don't think one can address the issue of "teacher" compensation without looking at teacher expertise and opportunity costs.
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.
"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):
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.
By "UK schools", it'll almost definitely be referring to GCSE (general certificate of secondary education) qualifications. And in this case, in ICT (Information Communications Technology; which doesn't contain any/no real programming).
So a couple (real) ICT GCSE exam can be seen here:
They actually do contain a bit more 'technical' stuff than when I did ICT GCSE (~7 years ago I guess?), but there's still not much.
As for this story, I agree with an earlier comment that there might be another side to this. None of my ICT teachers (as far as I know) knew how to program, but at the same time I can't imagine any of them would have failed a clearly-good piece of coursework.
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)
I assume you showed at each step where the results of the computations were stored? That's what the assignment was really about: can you inspect the stack and find a known value?
I was a TA in a computer systems class. Many of our homework assignments told the students to do a certain set of things, then explain why they see what they see. What I looked for was understanding. If you had shown on even one of the stacks where an expected value was, I'd give full credit.
Hm. I don't think that was the point. It was just to get everybody down to the computer center, run something, get your output back. We never looked at dumps again, we learned to use I/O macros next.
I believed the instructor was arrogant and dumb, probably felt challenged by somebody brighter than her. But I was 17 and the same I guess.
You never looked at dumps again as an assignment, sure, but being able to inspect a stack dump for an expected value is an invaluable tool when debugging.
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.
If you have to solve a general problem, your approach is fine. But if your specific task consists of precisely formulated steps, it's easy to see how you failed. In your case, you essentially boycotted the work that was handed out to you.
I had the fortune of taking the CS high school course in Germany at a time when nobody knew what computers actually were and a 486 was considered a high end workstation. The good part of this was that CS teachers made up their own curriculum. Our teacher gave us some theoretical background lectures, and then he assigned to us specific problems to solve in code. We were graded on functionality and, for extra credit, the elegance of the code - it didn't matter too much whether we did things by the book or not as long as we did them right.
CS courses are heavily standardized now. I figure most teachers haven't got a clue what they're doing, so this is probably a good way to ensure a minimum quality level across the country. But of course, that's what you get: the minimum level of quality. Either you give teachers free reign, with wildly varying results, or you standardize the lifeblood out of a subject. As a society we have opted for standardization on the lowest common denominator.
I did ignore the assignment. I was new to college, expected it to be a place full of exciting bright people, all feeding off one another's enthusiasm for knowledge. I'd hoped for, I don't know, some acknowledgement or something.
What I got was a seat in a lecture hall, and a drone ignoring my work.
As somebody who's been in a teaching role, I would have dinged you too. It's not that I want "drones," but if I give you an assignment and you ignore the requirements, you don't deserve a passing grade on that assignment. Now, if you came up to me and said, "Hey, can I get extra credit for doing a RPN calculator?" or even just "This is a little below my level — can I do an RPN calculator instead, as long as I mark the stack correctly?" I'd probably have said "Hell yeah!" But that isn't what you did. You ignored the teacher, and she ignored you right back.
(Edited to change "failed" to "dinged," as I think the former gave the wrong impression. I meant I would not have given full credit for completing that assignment.)
As someone who's been in a teaching role (in the Russian math circles for gifted children), I wouldn't have failed the student. My goal as a teacher is to make the student interested and competent. The student's objective is the same: to become interested and competent. Assignments and grades are means to that end, not an end in itself. If the student is already clearly interested and competent, and you make them lose interest by giving them a failing grade, you have sacrificed your top-level goal in favor of a class-centric subgoal that doesn't matter to anyone - or worse, sacrificed it to your selfish desire to avoid being ignored.
Maybe that sounded more callous than it was meant to. It's not about pride. I would talk to the student and explain why they didn't succeed. But I wouldn't give them a pass for ignoring the assignment.
Not carrying out the task assigned doesn't necessarily indicate interest or competence to me. Anybody can carry out a random task of their own choosing. The ability to successfully complete a problem put before you is much more valuable than the ability to complete some problem.
In particular, this assignment appears to have been as much about analyzing stack traces as anything else. He didn't demonstrate any competence in that area.
Personally, this is something I came to appreciate from my teachers. The ones who would let me just get away with anything as long as I made it look fancy bored me. I could literally get an A without knowing half the course material just by putting on a grand show. The ones who actually challenged me taught me a lot more. I can accomplish so much more when I'm not busy being an arrogant jerkoff.
Yeah, I'm like you and in the end it works out, I'm sure it did for you as it does for all of us.
The message I'd give to kids going through this is don't listen to the idiots that are complaining about complying with arbitrary orders when they themselves don't know what they are doing. So much talk in this thread about having to conform to specs. That's true if you have a government contract and intend to deliver a useless system that will be scrapped, which cost billions of tax dollars, but which exactly matches the spec that was done in consultation with a bunch of people that don't understand their own problem domain or what they really want. Meanwhile there are also companies like Apple that don't really care what the customers think they want, they build things that they think are the best, that are personal challenges according to their own vision. State education is a process of destroying this form of initiative.
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.
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.
The student is wrong, the assignment has not been met and they deserve to be failed.
However, they have also demonstrated abilities that show they should be nurtured at a higher level and can be mentoring. So get them to think about what's actually required for future assignments while encouraging them to help others.
Exactly. Thank you. The student who demonstrates exceptional ability should be rewarded and encouraged, but not with a good grade on an assignment they did not complete properly. Driving toward requirements, no matter how arbitrary or uninteresting they might seem, is an important skill in its own right. Business or career success often requires both technical mastery and discipline.
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.
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)
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).
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)
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.
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!
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.
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.
> ... 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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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)
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The brief is just that. The mark scheme undoubtedly suggests a more restrictive approach into how you produce a project in line with that brief.
It's like listening to the first sentence your client utters ("I want a program to calculate my expenses...") and then creating Excel when all they wanted was a calculator. For better or worse, it's not about doing whatever you like, and hiding behind the brief when there was a more detailed set of specs is immature.
You are assuming that there was a more detailed spec. that asked for something different to what he did. There's no indication of that in the article, you're just inventing things to prop up your argument.
I'm assuming? I did the same course that student did. The curriculum hasn't changed towards 'we won't tell you what you need to score the marks' - quite the opposite. It was like this 6 years ago and it was like this a years ago when my coworker showed me his mark scheme for a similar curriculum-mandated ICT project.
> There's no indication of that in the article
Because if there was, it would severely weaken his whole 'I'm surrounded by idiots' argument, wouldn't it? Good for the kid for making a cool app, but he has to learn that you don't get judged on your merits but by how successfully you complete your task.
Have you had any experience with GCSE ICT? As far as I am concerned, there is one person making judgments with less information and that person is you. Let's not forget you are seeing one side of the story - don't be so foolish and pretend it's the whole truth.
You can even view the mark schemes online! Here is but one exam board that does this:
It's amazing how I am ignorantly downvoted for something that is common knowledge among schoolchidren, seeing as they are given a mark scheme for every piece of coursework in every subject they take. I can only assume these people aren't from the UK...
> The curriculum hasn't changed towards 'we won't tell you what you need to score the marks'
I never said it did. It's perfectly possible to have a spec. that allows for more than one type of implementation. This is schoolwork, not NASA. The aim is to show that they understand the concepts and can produce results. Exact requirements aren't necessary for that.
From the spec. on the site you linked to - it seems Unit 4: Creating Digital Products is the relevant unit:
> > They can choose what sort of product to design and make, but it must include an appropriate user interface and user input must determine the outputs that are produced.
It seems to me there's a lot of freedom for students to choose implementation platform and language. While your school in particular might have been more specific in what you should build (and really, given the limitations of teacher knowledge, that makes sense), it doesn't follow that his must have been similarly restrictive. Unless you were literally in the same class as him, you aren't in a position to know what was asked of him, and your assumptions directly contradict the article.
> > There's no indication of that in the article
> Because if there was, it would severely weaken his whole 'I'm surrounded by idiots' argument, wouldn't it?
My point is that without further information, you aren't in a position to say that he ignored the spec. The article's direct statements trump your assumptions.
> As far as I am concerned, there is one person making judgments with less information and that person is you.
The only thing I have stated in my comments thus far relates to what is directly stated in the article and what you are saying. I'm not making assumptions, all I'm doing is pointing out you are doing so.
Right, first off, you are citing the brief and claiming that this is the basis on which people are marked. This is the very mistake I stated in the grandparent post and that you are making again. Stop claiming I am making 'assumptions' when you obviously have no clue as to the facts. The mark scheme is found under the 'Detailed unit content' section and that specifies a lot of things you need to do in addition to simply 'making a product'.
> without further information, you aren't in a position to say that he ignored the spec
So if you read between the lines in the student's statement, where in this did he say he did anything other than write some code? And you're accusing me of making assumptions?
> The article's direct statements trump your assumptions.
So find me the statements which show he actually did all the legwork you are required in the class. You are completely wrong here.
> From the spec. on the site you linked to - it seems Unit 4: Creating Digital Products is the relevant unit
It's not in fact the relevant unit, as there are several exam boards he could have used. That was given as an example (was in fact my coworker's unit). The brief actually matches OCR's ICT course (section 2.4):
Note how there is no requirement as to how to implement it. But also note how there is no requirement for candidates to show their code, even!
The student says:
> I argued the case and managed to scrape a pass by teaching him the basics of Objective-C from scratch and by commenting every single line of code I wrote to explain exactly what it did and how it did it (all 3,400 lines, including standard libraries I used) which ended up being a huge time sink.
This kid didn't read the mark scheme or he would know that you are not asked to comment the code, nor does doing so confer any direct proof that you can do any of the things that spec says you should demonstrate.
You're meant to show designs for the different parts of your programs, you're meant to demonstrate that you wrote code and that it does what you say it does, and you're meant to establish a testing procedure and document the outcome, among other things.
What you do NOT do is comment your code and call it a day. I know because I tried doing precisely that in my own project and was told "we don't want code, we want documentation". When the teacher says he doesn't have a clue how it works, it's because he was given a code dump. Documenting it so that a non-programmer can understand what you are doing is tedious but that is what you're being asked here.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.