mio (@mio)

Liam O'Connor @liamoc@types.pl

1mo

Feeling pretty devastated. The vast majority of my first year students failed their second midsem test, with over half of the submissions having compile errors. This is for a second programming course, where they're given and recommended to use IntelliJ. I'm racking my brain to see if I could have done anything differently. I don't think the test had too little time, it took tutors 25 minutes to complete (100%) and I gave the students 90 minutes. I gave them a practice exam that was the same format and structure (and very similar content) to the actual exam. I gave them homework exercises that are for nominal marks but primarily designed for programming practice and nearly half of the students have never even forked the repo to start homework 1, which came out 10 weeks ago. My class of over 100 students gets lecture attendance of around 10.

Why do I even bother?

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mio @mio@shrimp.mio19.uk

1mo

@liamoc This is related to my experience. Similar situation happened when there were some education system level failures. I was in a place where some students didn't want the current major but choosing a different major was impossible. Some other students seemed don't want any study but staying in university was beneficial to them for other reasons. No one wanted to turn up and when people did turn up, people were minding their own businesses.

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Liam O'Connor @liamoc@types.pl

1mo

@mio what I don't get is why students do this, and more specifically why this problem seems so much worse than it used to be. Even 10 years ago there was indeed a lot of people who were just doing computing because they thought it was a path to a good job and they didn't really like it for its own merits, but they were still motivated enough to apply themselves to their studies and gain at least basic skills. That is now mostly gone.

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