From: ericfw@hardy.u.washington.edu (Eric F.)
Subject: Re: STUDENT LATENESS (re the submission of assignments)
Date: 15 Nov 91 12:35:10 GMT
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle

	Lawdy mercy me, I ain't never *seen* such pettifoggin' and
prevaricatin' nohow! Body posts one leetle note and de hole dam world done
come apart at the seams! Ya gets cute wif' one leetle riff - 'one of
them students' - and de hole net lands on yo' hide. I hope you get the point 
this time. 
	I've been watching this thread ever since my last posting was 
labelled 'whiny psycho-babble'. As tempted as I am to let the whole issue 
die, the original post and early replies have touched a nerve, so I'm going 
to let out a yelp. 
	In 1986, I dropped out of the University of Colorado and went 
(penniless) to Alaska to sea. I was gone three years, scrubbing holds
and baiting fishhooks. I returned in 1989 with my bills paid and a
modest savings, and enrolled in the University of Washington. One 
of my first classes was Computer Science, which was to be my major.
The UW has a fairly reputable CS department, sends its graduates to
many of the better grad schools and attracts substantial funding for
its research projects. Getting into the UW is only slightly harder than 
getting into most land grant schools, and anybody who gets in can
enroll for CS210-211, the introductory sequence. On the other hand,
the upper division courses require an 'entry card', which is issued
by the department to students it deems worthy. You can take the
first two classes for free(so to speak),but to advance you need to do
well. The University, in the name of higher standards, has set rather
strict size limits on the upper division classes. The exact figure
eludes me, but I think it is 32 students per class. The first day of
CS210, about 250 students showed up. The enrollment was limited to
somewhat less than 250, but many of the students were there in hopes
that others would drop and they would get to enroll. Many of these
people were there because they had a science requirement to fill,
others were there because they intended to major in CS or 
Engineering. Quite a few were simply there to learn how to program
computers. The late arrivals got their wish:when the last bell rang
on CS211 seven months later, less than one half of the people who
had appeared for the first day of class remained. Of those, perhaps
a third had grades that would not permit them to continue. I spent
some time talking to CS210 students of every stripe, not only in that
first quarter but in the subsequent two years. Without generalizing
too much, I think it's fair to say that the students who were the
most dedicated, disciplined and well prepared went on. Many of the
students who emerged at the top of the class had computers at 
home and had been using them for years. On the other hand, many of
those who dropped out or did poorly left muttering, uh, 'whining',
about how the course was too hard, took too much time, or was
pointless. From the perspective of the school, and I suppose from the
perspectives of Mssrs. Bralick and Baldwin, the course was a success.
The upper division classes had their stock of bright students, and
the malingerers, malcontents, and illiterates were filtered out. 
	I remember this class rather well. I remember being up until
2AM, waiting 20 minutes for 300 lines of code to compile on the
antiquated equipment, while millions of dollars of computers slept in
the labs only yards away. I remember the teaching assistants with no
training struggling to teach to classes of 40 - 60 students a
language that they themselves did not use or understand(it was ADA).
I remember spending hours committing to memory concepts which are
trivially understood if presented properly. I remember going to a TA
for help after a poor quiz score and hearing him confess in a
whisper that he had taken the same quiz as a self test and had failed it
also. He went on to say that he knew nobody in the department who
used the language, and that many of the TA's had never even seen it 
until a few days before the first class. I remember going to the 
TA's for help and finding a line of 15 people going down the hall.
I remember the professor's diatribes on cheating. Several 
times during the quarter, he would tell us about how he sat on an 
academic discipline comittee, how he was responsible for determining 
who got thrown out of school, how he had thrown people out before, how 
willing he was to do it again, how hard he looked for cheaters and how 
tough he was on them. On top of it all, the part that really
convinced me that I was in the wrong place, was getting back a
programming assignment and realizing that it had gotten only the 
most cursory inspection by somebody who evidently didn't know
how to write a program. In this class, like many others, grading of
students' work was left to 'student assistants'. The student
assistants were juniors or seniors, paid $5 - $6 an hour to
glance at scores of nearly identical printouts produced by freshmen
and sophomores. Each printout represented up to 100 hours of work.
For some students, the assignments represented the difference between
staying in the US or going home to China or Japan in defeat. Each
assignment got about three minutes' attention. I know this because I
had friends who were graders, and I watched them. They knew they could
not analyze the program logic, so they focussed on cosmetic aspects.
Uncapitalized reserved words were marked down. Poor indentation was
penalized. Comments were graded, often more for their verbosity than
their content. Since the graders didn't have time(or take time) to
check the program logic, they couldn't tell if the comments in the
margins accurately described the adjacent code. Cumbersome, buggy
code in one assignment would be passed over, while another student
who found an elegant solution to the same problem would be marked
down for 'faulty indentation', or some such thing. I realize that
nothing good comes easy, and that if you want to acquire knowledge
you must work at it. The real kick to the guts came when I realized
that despite all the effort expended neither I nor anybody else was 
learning how to program computers. We were racing like rats through
a maze that was only lined with computers. The class was graded on a
curve, and since so much rode on this grade in particular, the class
was competitive as hell. The critiques of the students work was
arbitrary, capricious, and cosmetic. What this added up to was a
scramble to find out what was going to pass for good work, without
any real thought about meaning or content. The class had quite a few 
students who were there simply because they wanted to learn how to
program computers. Watching them trying to learn in that class was
like watching a fish trying to breathe on a sidewalk. It takes a half
hour for a fish to die;killing talent and ambition takes a little
longer. Students who are losing it lose it by degrees:they start
strong, then they start dozing off in lectures, then showing up
late. At some point they may hand in homework late, then not at
all...

	In the end, most of the people who had passed were the ones who had
computers at home and who knew how to program before they got into
the class. The use of their own equipment had enabled them to avoid
the wait for working gear, and the skills they had in hand to begin
with enabled them to focus on exclusively on grades. Of course,
bright and ambitious students were over-represented in this group.
The professor was able to look at the students who had succeeded and
rightly claim that the best had for the most part passed. The grades
followed a nice bell-shaped curve, and the 'whiners' had all been
weeded out. On the last day of class we were handed an evaluation
form. At last, my chance to change the course of education. The form
that we used to grade the professor was every bit as meaningless as
the forms he used to grade us! Here we were trying to fit this
experience on a scale of 0 to 4 when nothing less than a loud Bronx
cheer could really describe it. I sat with that form in my hand and
tried to figure out what to write. I was rating the professor. The
prof had walked into a course of some 250 total strangers, of all
ranges of abilities and interests, and had been charged with
teaching them something that can be taught only with great effort. He
had no control over the size of his class, the quality of the
equipment, the length of the quarter, or any really relevant
factor. The fact that the TA's were overworked and undertrained, the
demands that the students be graded on a rigid linear scale so that
many of them could be eliminated, the fact that some of the students
were well ahead of the pack or behind it, the total absence of
institutional support for undergraduate education at this 'research'
college - all beyond his reach. The longer I groped for a reply that
would effect constructive change, the more discouraged I got. In the
first place, the students who had had the most trouble had all left the
class, and were not present to comment. My little entry was doomed
to be a statistic unless I did something drastic to bring my
complaints to the school's attention. If I made an appointment
with the prof or the Dean(assuming I could get one), it could very
well end with the TA's being punished or criticized for a situation
that was no more of their making than it was mine. I might be
bribed with a higher grade. More likely, I would be told that I was a
'whiner' and shown the door. I know, because I've been through it
before. In the end, I wrote something like 'grading policies could
have been clearer', gave the class and the prof passing B's and C's,
accepted a grade that put me about in the middle of the finishers,
and left. The next quarter I re-enrolled in several classes I had no
intention of taking. Full-time enrollment gives you library and 
computer privileges at the UW. I got a job as a student consultant in
the micro lab, and spent the quarter in the computer lab or the
library, learning on my own what the University could not teach
me. I failed several classes that quarter, to no regret. What
mattered was that I learned enough about programming to get a job
with a software firm that employed people who knew what they were
doing and were eager to share their knowledge with people who were
eager to learn. I have never looked back. From time to time I see a
resume from some of the people who took that class with me, but I
have never hired one. Just the same, I wish them luck. 
	One bad class is no reason to judge an entire institution,
any more than one misspelled word is a reason to judge an
individual's literary abilities. If I dropped out of school because
of this class I could rightly be called lazy. What knocked me out of
school was not the fact that it was a poor class, but that it was a
typical class. It wasn't even the worst one I had; the classes that
were unchallenging and absurd were even worse. I can speak for a lot
of people when I say that I am neither drug-addicted, nor lazy, nor
insolent, nor violent, yet I have failed several times in college.
Yes, failed. Like thousands of others, I enrolled believing that 
if I sought knowledge with honesty and diligence, the faculty would
not let my effort go to waste. I was wrong, not once, not twice, but
three times. I sought someone that would make the effort to find out
what I could do and pull it out of me. I failed. I am not contrite. 
I will not again put myself into the hands of any school until I can be 
certain that school will respect an honest effort to learn with an honest 
effort to teach. 
	I have had some good classes, so I know how electrifying a
good class can be. In every case, the professor has taken the time to 
find out what the students can do, then has demanded more of them.
Rarely do you see a late paper in these classes; rarely a snoozer
either. I would like to extend Mr Baldwin the benefit of the doubt
he has denied me and assume that I could find him at the head of
one of those classes. His postings give me cause to doubt. In any
case, Mr Baldwin, please keep in mind that if you misjudge your
students as you misjudge me, you will spend your career wasting
the initiative you claim to cherish, and you will be the last one to
know. 

=Eric Fowler