Somehow students are leaving the project til the last month. I am not sure why this is. Perhaps the project should be turned into a course unit in its own right, so that students can spend time over the semester. (This is what my old uni did and it worked well).
But I've found that the propensity to do nada among students is a bit too high to be explained just by the lack of time. True some students do actually spend time, but often the projects are just not compelling enough. The other issues (of skewed grading scales) can be worked out, but generally the level of inspiration is lacking. Whose to blame? Not sure quite yet.
But as Wire points out, things have improved *greatly* over the years. We simply need to keep the momentum...
P.
On Jul 21, 2004, at 16:00, Patrick Okui wrote:
On Wednesday 21 July 2004 15:15, Paul Bagyenda wrote:Never gave up. Just never sure why the old excuses keep getting dredged
up, even in the Internet Age.
Well, as someone who has to present their project tomorrow at the Institute of
Computer science I just have the following to say:
-> development time of slightly more than a month (not counting exam periods)
for a project left me using ugly tools like php (so I could write a component
for mambo).
-> 5 marks awarded to implementation and 95 to report writing kind of tells me
where I should concentrate my efforts :-D
-> having almost no one who knows what should be going on behind the scenes on
the examination panel means someone can rig up a "project" which is just a
set of flash and/or heitml transitions between states without implementing
anything. Basically all one has to do is ensure that error messages are
popped up in javascript or whatever when invalid input is detected and they'd
be happy.
(not to mention that the only electronics related project we had was condemned
by the said panel because it's "more electronics related than computer
science"...)
-> given that I still have to present this project of mine tomorrow, I guess
I've said more than enough.. (and yes I did do a full project) but this is
one very disgruntled candidate.
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