Comment by airdweia | Hacker News Reader

Comment by airdweia | Hacker News Reader

Please please please under no circumstances attend Lambda, everything the poster says is true. Two weeks before the end of CS for me they initiated a pass/fail for a test that we were never taught anything about and then mandated that you repeat the entire CS curriculum if you weren’t able to pass it. They said that it didn’t matter that I passed all of my sprints and scored 100% on the unit assessment, that I needed to repeat a class (along with 3/4 of my cohort) just to pass this test. They never owned up to the fact that they didn’t teach the material on the test, as was evident by the fact that they removed ALL GitHub projects in CS and replaced them with Codesignal challenges. I messaged “Student Success” for weeks and was ignored and when they did deign to respond to me it was a generic canned response that addressed none of my issues save “Deal with it”. I took to speaking about the problems in the open channels and I was removed from Slack and forcefully “withdrawn” from Lambda. It is utter chaos there.

Former student here as well. Can confirm everything here. I know multiple students “withdrawn” (kicked out of Slack with no warning and still on the hook for the ISA) after they gave respectful negative feedback. The whole thing is a giant scam after I realized a $10 Udemy course was higher quality than all of Lambda’s lectures.

Hey airdwea,

I’m sorry you were frustrated by the GCA assessment. We don’t use assessments as a means of harming students, but we do genuinely want to make sure that you are ready to move onto the next level before doing so. I understand this can be frustrating.

This particular assessment, you’re correct, is not a direct map to the previous couple weeks of content, but rather a summative general assessment that covers material taught over longer periods of time. Anyone who is interested can google “CodeSignal General Coding Assessment” and find the assessment.

I don’t believe we’ve removed anyone from Slack for voicing concerns, but if you’d like to email me austen@lambdaschool.com I’ll look into it.

Why are people downvoting this? The CEO of the company being discussed is replying to people voicing their concerns. If you think he's saying something wrong, write a comment to it. Don't simply downvote it. Too many sensitive trigger-fingers here.

Because its obviously an empty PR response that dismisses the legitimate criticism of the scam/product.

All Austin or in fact anyone from lambda does is pr speak questions/comments he thinks are softballs. Simply search every lambda post on hn.

He and his pyramid scheme lost the benefit of doubt years ago.

Just read this: https://support.codesignal.com/hc/en-us/articles/36005196013... - if you so much as sneeze you get disqualified..

What's the point of doing this privacy invasive test?

The cynic in me wants to think it is to prepare students for the future when they will be similarly tested by their employers.

PS I am a lector at a University (Europe) and teach at various bootcamps where I would never think of asking of such draconian measures.

Oh. It uses some kind of proctoring service. Those are bloody awful.

I'm a PhD student at Imperial College London. Last exams season was entirely replaced with "timed open book coursework", carried out via Blackgoard and Wiseflow. I'm not sure about the privacy record of the orgs behind these two pieces of software, but there was no proctoring of any sort and we graduates were spared from invigilator duties, that we'd normally have to perform.

Indeed, the College relied on the students' honour to avoid cheating:

A reminder about cheating and collusion

Students who are identified to have colluded will face disciplinary action.

You must not confer with fellow students or any other individuals during the exam. We trust you. However, if there is a concern that you have not followed the code of conduct expected, the College has a range of options at its disposal. The College reserves its right to impose additional forms of assessment including individual student vivas, if required. These may also be used to assist the examiners and the Boards of Examiners in assuring that the assessment process has been conducted fairly and in accordance with the agreed marking schemes. You are reminded that if we become aware of proposed or evidenced actions for collusion that such allegations will be reported and investigated in accordance with the College’s Academic Misconduct Procedure.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/electrical-engineering/internal/c...

Right? "We trust you". I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if that works for Imperial, it should work for a bootcamp.

If 3/4ths of a cohort have to repeat the material, it's not the students who have failed.

It was not 3/4ths of a cohort

What was the actual ratio...?

Please keep speaking up.

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