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!"
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.