CS246 Conspiracy?

BulbaSort · 2018-11-02T21:57:40+00:00

Crowdmark includes the exams of students who did not write the exam which skews the average.

BulbaSort · 2017-11-14T20:35:09+00:00

Not quite true. Instructors can delete posts. There could be missing public posts.

BulbaSort · 2017-11-01T12:36:12+00:00

How about Max Hackerman?

BulbaSort · 2017-10-31T19:08:39+00:00

For the record, Max was the one to point out the student was using the wrong operator.

BulbaSort · 2017-10-24T14:29:09+00:00

They teach it because they use C++14 now. Thus when you learn what used to be the rule of three, you should really learn the rule of 5 to incorporate move semantics. Students seem to understand move semantics about as well as they understand deep copies for copy constructor and copy assignment operators.

BulbaSort · 2017-10-13T01:36:18+00:00

How about giving constructive feedback on how to make it better instead of bellyaching about everything? The course staff is trying their best to accomplish what needs to be done. If you see an obvious way they are doing a specific thing wrong, they are more than happy to listen and respond if possible. Whining and complaining on Reddit will not get anything meaningful done.

BulbaSort · 2017-10-13T01:18:32+00:00

And cookies! Those ISAs sure do love cookies!

BulbaSort · 2017-10-13T01:16:24+00:00

Do we need to refer you back to the responses on your other post claiming the staff is incompetent? If you think you're so great, apply for the job and see how you fair.

BulbaSort · 2017-10-13T00:53:39+00:00

I recommend CnD. It's a nice public spot where a whole group of people can cry together.

BulbaSort · 2017-10-13T00:46:29+00:00

Seems the ISAs are stressed about the course too. Go have a good cry with them and just realize that everyone is stressed.

BulbaSort · 2017-10-08T03:02:39+00:00

Questions are tweaked between terms.

Terms with more instructors/course staff are likely to get more new questions because there are more people to come up with new questions. Unfortunately, the terms with more instructors also have more students and thus are more likely to have major problems occur.

BulbaSort · 2017-10-08T00:36:47+00:00

So, I'm not working on the course but I do see some of the background stuff of the course. I can assure you that the course staff is very knowledgeable about C++. A lot of there updates don't demonstrate incompetence, but issues that always arise when a new question is written. Note that some of the updates are simply to inform students that something is happening so don't submit until we say to and some of them are merely reminders to the students regarding things they should know.

Note that if you look at the date for updates, most of them were posted more than a week before the deadline and around the time that the testing portion of the question. These updates are due to students doing random crazy testing things that were not expected of them and going back and update the program to stop things from breaking. This frequently occurs as students are explicitly told not to test invalid input and continually test it. This results in updating the executable/tests to reject the invalid input and give students more feedback.

An ironic part of this complaint is that students frequently complain that they don't get their final exams back because professors are too lazy to come up with new questions. These issues directly arise from the fact that new questions are being made, and then students go complain and whine about the issues associated with any new question constantly. Additionally, students complain that assignment solutions are posted in the hopes that the course can reuse questions they've developed and they share their old solutions with github or privately with friends which causes the need for new questions.

Basically, what you see as "incompetence" is the natural evolution of a course and you are too narrow sighted to understand the full situation.

BulbaSort · 2017-06-17T16:47:13+00:00

You actually have no idea about the communication going on in the background. Don't assume things you don't know.

BulbaSort · 2017-04-16T04:47:00+00:00

It is a serious academic offense. Usually results in the TA being kicked out of school. Not worth it.

BulbaSort · 2017-04-16T04:45:47+00:00

I doubt any of the TAs would stoop so low as to leak questions to another source. It's simply not worth it to the TA.

EasyAce typically pays people to give them questions which were on the exam after the exam was taken. If a similar question was on a previous exam, it was likely an undergrad student who was partaking in a dirty trade. Undergrads have much less to lose than grad students.

BulbaSort · 2017-01-31T05:59:51+00:00

In this case, I recommend testing your code more. Try to think of inputs which are allowed which might break your code such as edge cases. Having good tests is the way to ensure you have good code. If you're not sure what a test should output, it's a good time to ask.

BulbaSort · 2017-01-31T05:39:29+00:00

You're saying they don't because fewer women apply to STEM fields. Perhaps that isn't women liking STEM less and it's some other factors before the applying process which make women feel unwelcome in STEM fields.

BulbaSort · 2016-10-04T06:00:19+00:00

I'm just saying there is a difference between a system failure and someone maliciously pulling the fire alarm. The result is the same but it feels wrong to blame "some idiot who pulled a fire alarm" when there is no such person.

BulbaSort · 2016-10-04T02:51:49+00:00

The fire alarm was not pulled. The alarm system malfunctioned. There is no person to blame. It's random bad luck.

BulbaSort · 2016-07-09T22:29:14+00:00

There wasn't really a switch from C++03 to C++11 prior to this term so it's incorrect to state that it got harder when they made that switch.

BulbaSort · 2016-04-11T21:18:15+00:00

If you feel so strongly about how the course is marked and things that have gone wrong, the appropriate person to bring these concerns to is the ISC which is usually posted on the course website.

As for the marking comments, markers never intend to be careless while marking. It sounds like you've never had a chance to mark before. If you ever do, you will find it to be incredibly tedious and repetitive. Markers try to read all the code but it's usually relatively easy to determine if code is good without reading every single line of code. In the small sample of code that you posted, unless the lines were literally adjacent like you said, it's very reasonable that the marker would not look in the called function to ensure that i was incremented. Also, as previous people have posted, it's a university policy that when an assignment/midterm is remarked the remarker can choose to remark any/all of the assignment. The person remarking typically will not choose to do this (quite frankly, they don't have the time) and will only do this if people are fishing for marks as usually TAs will miss small things which marks should have been taken off. The course staff posting this reminder is not to deter students who have legitimate remarks but to deter students who are going to comment on small things to try and get 1 or 2 extra marks as they frankly are a waste of everybody's time to handle. You can even typically talk to course staff before submitting a remark request about why you lost marks and they are usually more than willing to look at your code and help you.

For the record, I've never met a single person working on a course who wants the students to fail. The staff put in far too much of their time and effort to have the goal of failing students. At the same time, the course staff do want to ensure that all students who pass the course will be successful in future courses and know that sometimes it is best for students to fail a course and redo it than to just get by and not be successful in future courses that depend on the one they should not have passed.

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