Software Engineering – Week the Ninth
Web development can be extremely fun: designing a RESTful API, using some frameworks to do most of the heavy-lifting and getting to see your content live on the web. So fun in fact that I’ve done something similar before, outside of class (albeit with different collaborators and different frameworks), before I was assigned this task in Software Engineering. On both this current project and my previous projects like it I have a great team. And over the past week we’ve completed the first segment of the assignment and included every requirement listed… we think. And there’s the rub.
Downing used to have an assignment called the “World Crisis Database.” The basic idea was to create an IMDB-type website to talk about world crises and who was involved. Then it started getting repetitive. Very, very, very repetitive supposedly. At which point Downing made, what I consider, a very wise decision for this semester and started letting project teams pick the theme of their website. However, there was a dark side to this: all of the accumulated specifications from other years needed to be rewritten to account for this new-found flexibility. I can imagine how difficult it must be to grade or make grading criteria for projects which have different focuses (it’s like a more constrained version of scoring hackathon projects). It takes time to get that sort of change right so that the assignments are graded in a fair manner. Fairness is a difficult thing.
Those truly great teachers had something in common: their hand mastered the magic ratio of guiding and slapping.
I’ve had quite a few teachers; nice, cruel, incompetent, and truly great. Those truly great teachers had something in common: their hand mastered the magic ratio of guiding and slapping (and by slapping, I mean harsh grading). This is a magic ratio. Too much of a guiding hand and the introspection and growth of pupils won’t happen. Conversely, too much slapping and the students shut down and give up. Even in the right ratio, the grade-slapping needs to be done in a way that promotes a belief in efficacy: putting in more effort will actually change your grade, and discourage the belief in luck, brown-nosing, or sacrifices at sunset. Unfortunately, when there are grading criteria that turn out to be confusing (the confusion emerging last-minute so there is not enough time to ask the instructor clarifications), the belief in luck starts to grow.
Typos, confusion and general lack of clarity tend to happen. We’re human after all. This is a normal part of the world. And everything is fun and games until the stress starts setting in. When you’re told “your academic record depends on getting this checklist correct” and have to follow a checklist where some items resemble Schrödinger’s cat in terms of pertinence, the quizzical frowns and actual frowns can start to happen. This was the case with the project checklist. However, this might be a non-issue: it all depends on whether the sometimes conflicting, and sometimes seemingly non-pertinent requirements are counted.
3/22/2014