Another great solution is to give an interview-like oral whiteboard interview for midterms/final. Quite time consuming (you can’t just assign the TA’s a grading prompt) but quite effective.
I don't believe that investment made in time or money should factor in to assessing a student's mastery.
Money in education perverts everything. More generally money is the root of all evil, eh? But if you took my cash and I get nothing? Thats a very loud complaint and/or lawsuit.
> you took my cash and I get nothing?
If I book a hotel room then turn up a week later than my booking date trying to get a room I can expect to receive nothing.
Somehow, I missed this theory and also just wanted to skip all my classes with no repercussions, but I wish it had been explained to me better.
Guess I'm a terrible person/s
Maybe in america... but at the end of the day its not that hard to tell the customer to fuck off. The value proposition of a university is either the credential or self-improvement. Its not their customer service.
I get it that shit happens in life (imagine someone having exams two days after they buried a father/mother/brother/sister), now THAT person, yeah, boost their results by 'one step' because if they got a 40% going through THAT, then they would have gotten 60% in a normal/BAU situation.
But don't hand out degrees to people who don't deserve them. It dilutes the degrees of those who do.
(This is, at least, my policy. A grade reflects mastery and only mastery, but it's my job to help students get there and sometimes that means finding creative solutions.)
E.g. implement a simple compiler for a C-ish language with only functions, if and while loops; as the big change, ask to add for loops.
Do you have examples of projects used?
... and required an awful lot of resources to grade, unsustainable for modern academia that has been perverted to be mostly a diploma mill.
No front but a "CS degree" is, for 99% of the people that have one, factually useless - people only do it because employers use it as a very efficient filter to weed out everyone who might have an issue with what big corporate demands - cogs in a wheel, not artisans with own opinions. The purpose of academia isn't science and advancing it anymore, it is raking in tuition money on one side and molding people to corporate drone conformity.
I think the simpler explanation is that the CS degree is supposed to be an independent verification that the student has learned and can employ fundamental aspects of CS.
I realize that verification can often be wrong (especially now with the ubiquity of LLMs), but I think the view that employers are simply looking for "cogs" and avoiding "artisans" is an arrogant and cynical take on what a degree is supposed to indicate.
- Mild autism, mild ADHD, undiagnosed until recently. Intersectionality leads to highly bespoke set of strengths, weaknesses, behaviors.
- Mensa-level IQ, smart enough and high enough performing to have done well despite friction (and no degree.)
- High need for autonomy in learning and work practices. Never consciously understood it until recently, but instinctively and awkwardly fought for it.
- Clash highly with scrum, agile, any high-process environment. Don't fit well in larger or more formal companies.
- High achieving, high output, quality output in good conditions, but low ambition for entrepreneurship, management, or advancing in an org's hierarchy.
- Earn trust early on at each company through high achievement but inevitable friction with management grows over time as I use the capital to secure high freedom, independence, optimal conditions for my own productivity and comfort.
- End up quitting jobs at the two year mark due to friction except for one where my accomplishments kept me around much longer.
- I interview well with people who just want to know someone is smart and gets it and is easy to get along with, interview poorly with people looking for a more specific and narrow profile.
- Good natured and likable, but don't form networking relationships. I like interacting with people and working alongside people, but need to be independent and do my work on my own. I'm not antisocial, but a lot of what teamwork and leadership and collaboration mean in engineering today are alien to me.
- Kind of selfish from a team point of view because I'm so individualistic and focused on my own work practice needs, but when I work with business or other end users I'm highly compassionate and driven to understand and solve their needs.
- It feels like I speak a different language as other smart people, other high performing engineers. I find things easy that others find hard, and vice versa. I feel pain points others don't, and vice versa. Ambitious and curious but not in a way that matches other high achievers. I solve problems others have struggled with, especially if they benefit from creative problem solving or a nonstandard solution. It's seen either a strength or a weakness depending on the situation and the people around me.
- My last job was the first one I've had that was defined more by the friction than the success but I still did good work and left on my own terms. It sucked, I haven't bothered with a job search since.
I don't think I want to work in engineering again. What it means to be a successful part of an engineering team has evolved too far away from my preferences and strengths and needs. I'm no longer interested in fighting it or faking it. I'd be happiest in whatever low profile job let me do my own thing. I don't mind dull business work or even rote work if I can do it or automate it my own way. Job descriptions are pretty homogenous and aren't written to expose what I'd really want or need in a job. I'm probably overqualified for the job that would fit me best for the rest of my career. But I have a lot of money saved and low living expenses and don't mind lower comp if it means having a job I'd like.
The meetings were specifically for scrum/agile shit, so standups, planning, estimating, retrospective. I'm not including the meetings to design new features or so.
This resonates strongly with me.
I find past the two year mark at a company I wind up starting to burn out and causing friction with my management and teammates
Unfortunately I don't have the savings to retire or anything, and job hopping so frequently is a big challenge for me. I'd really like to find a way off of the treadmill and into less stressful day to day operating
Look at how many basic paper pusher bullshit jobs these days require some sort of academic degree (often enough, it's literally any academic degree). It's obvious that the true intention is to violate the ADA and other anti discrimination laws in spirit without violating it in a legal sense, because it's pretty obvious that minorities and those with any kind of disadvantages have markedly lower chances of acquiring an academic degree.
And even leaving that aside, "academic degree" is a good proxy for "doesn't use drugs to a degree he can't function, doesn't have too bad ADHD or other issues, is likely able to fulfill duties somewhat on time and has an attention span of larger than 30 seconds". This is stuff that companies had to risk hiring (and firing) on their own dime, so by requiring an academic degree they offload that cost onto the prospective employees.
When you have 5 positions open, and 100, 500, or even more people applying for that position, having a broad filter to help reduce the numbers it very useful. While that filter can be wrong, using it is likely to raise the average qualifications of the people in the pool, even if it does cut out some of the well qualified people.
I just don't understand how people can believe this. I learned most of my programming skills in college, and everyone I know did too. I could program before, but really poorly, because I didn't have fundamental computer science knowledge. Taking algorithms, theoretical comp sci, discrete structures - these transformed me from a code monkey to a real programmer.
That's what I meant! Companies don't want "real programmers". They want cogs who mindlessly implement what some "architect" dreams up, no questions asked.
Land the architect role and you're set for life (or at least until AGI appears), but everything else is just destined to be either moved off to AI or be replaced by some sort of offshoring venture.
This, a lot of the self taught folks that sneer at degrees often struggle with things that were essentially solved by algorithms that are very familiar to people with an education.