Comment by alextgordon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alextgordon | Hacker News Reader

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> It's stories like this where I would like to see a more 'journalistic' approach, i.e. hearing both sides of a story. I have a hard time believing a teacher would simply put an 'F' on a project because, even though he's seen it running on the phones of his colleagues, he would say 'I don't understand how it works so I'll just fail it'.

You have to understand how the system works in the UK. From ages 15-18, there are ~4 years of exams, preparation for exams, that kind of thing. Ultimately these exams are mostly meaningless, their main purpose is to get you a place at university (which is only 3 years, go figure).

The exams are set by these big official exam boards. Now during this time, the teachers aren't going to be thinking "Does this deserve an A", they're going to be thinking "Would an examiner give this an A". The exam boards circulate marking schemes. If it doesn't meet the criteria sufficiently (has the candidate demonstrated with this that they know the difference between a file and a folder in this project?), it's not going to be given an A, regardless of merit.

I've had teachers explain to me that otherwise A-quality projects have been given low marks because they were written in C++ instead of VB6.

I was an ICT teacher in the UK for 5 years. Our requirement is that we teach units to an accepted common standard.

http://www.teach-ict.com/contributors/Ritchie_King/gcseproje...

Is an example of one marking scheme that I found (on a quick search).

See page 7 and notice that the requirement is that the student "identify" on a scale of 5 marks

- A clear statement of the problem, giving some background detail and identifying user(s)

- Consideration of possible alternative solutions with adequate justification given for the chosen method

- Quantitative objectives or user requirement

Now if a student just goes out and makes a mobile app that doesn't cover any of the requirements so for the above section I'd have been forced to give a 0.

The UK school system has a number of very deep, systematic problems that are preventing it from delivering a good education in IT.

It's a shame, it's frustrating and it's not going to change any time soon.

One thing I had drummed into me in my UK ICT education (admittedly 15 years ago and it wasn't called ICT then) was that we were aiming at fulfilling client desires; that we shouldn't just go off and produce something cool, if it wasn't of use to the described and defined end user (who we had a great amount of freedom to select) and we couldn't objectively justify our development approach, it wasn't good enough.

Now, I can't say I object to a marking scheme that requires students to learn to develop what is useful and efficient rather than just what is cool...

I would much rather kids make stuff that is cool, rather than stuff that is useful. They have 60 years after they leave school to make useful stuff (probably for other people).

There was a strong software engineering and project management streak to the course when I was on it; you were taught that code was written for a purpose and for an end user, and that you should be aiming at that target. You could have written a game or a graphics demo if you could have justified it, but you had to actually produce what you could argue somebody wanted.

Frankly, for a relatively vocational course, I think that was the right balance. If they want to play then let them but teach them the discipline of producing to a spec too.

I agree with you 100%, and from an educational and learning theory perspective that's the way to go. Something that is engaging, interesting, exciting and cool is highly motivating and therefore has a much greater chance of being able to "sneak in" the learning while the kids think they're just having a bit of fun.

Unfortunately, that's now how it works in England. It's completely bass-ackwards and all performance and learning has to be measured so that it can be inspected, compared to others' and reported on.

Unless there is a political "sea change" in England with respect to this issue, your "preference" is worthless. Edexcel, is a private publisher who writes the exams, and sells the textbooks and makes millions of pounds a year on the system as is. Inspection and Regulation can be billed at a tremendous markup and it pays for a lot of lobbyists.

Unions in England were broken by Thatcher, so the 3 (4?) teacher's unions (yes, plural) are powerless to lobby against the system ... in a brilliant case of divide and conquer, they spend as much time arguing amongst themselves as lobbying for teacher's right to be trusted.

The office of inspection of schools has a motto of something like "Better education through inspection" ... how disjointed is that? Not through "instruction" or "enjoyment" or "making cool stuff" but "inspection"

Sorry ... your preference is irrelevant.

I feel very passionately about that, every day they're failing their children and they can do so much better.

It's a large part of the reason I've quit teaching but, Que Sera right?

I've had my project graded one mark lower (even thought it was more cool and had more features than projects other people submited), because there was no documentation, and no easy way to install it.

Now I think I should go and give flowers to that teacher :)

Your teacher was 'compensating' the feature set and creativity against the lack of documentation, a trade off.

The point that was made above was that in the UK we as teachers don't have that leeway. We have to grade according to criteria for different aspects of the assignment.

I would have made you put a proposal form in first explaining your feature set, and why you needed those features or what they added to your project. If we had to, that proposal would become the documentation!

Fair enough. The story wasn't about getting a A or not though; it was about the student being failed initially, and the teacher (supposedly) saying he was failing the student because he (the teacher) didn't understand how it worked or even what it really was.

Look, the purpose of the project (any project) is to meet its stated evaluation criteria. Sometimes those are vague, and then the project will surely fail; sometimes (like in standardized testing) they're not, and in those cases purposely doing something contrary to the project objectives would be a sure way to get the project to fail (or, in a school test, get a failing grade).

OK, one can propose that it's a poor way of 'teaching' (and I'd mostly agree with anyone who'd take that position), or one can propose that the criteria that are used to evaluate students are wrong, or many other positions. And although I'm not intimately familiar with the UK system per se, I am with a number of systems who have similar properties (but I'm not in a position to judge how they compare to the UK system).

Still, the picture as it's being painted in the article is so one-sided as to become unbelievable. My more abstract point is: it's easy to (as an outsider) complain about teachers, government officials, workers at large companies, workers at small companies etc, but the reality is that there are many much more nuanced considerations than 'they should award points based on the real skill!' or 'they should work faster!' or 'they should be more lenient in applying policies!'.

And actually, to play the devil's advocate, I would have to agree (at least in principle) with anyone who would argue that the student's failure to understand and play by the rules alone should be reason enough to not give him an A. The project was (if I read between the lines) not 'develop something multimedia, anything you want, as cool as possible' but rather 'develop something multimedia-related taking into account the things we covered in class over the last semester', even if maybe it wasn't stated that explicitly. The successful person is not the one who will make himself a victim when he goes pseudo-lawyering (btw anyone else head to re-read the 'sudo' line a few times to understand the kid meant 'pseudo'?) to interpret the rules of the game to make them fit his definition; it's the one who has the skills to understand the explicit and implicit boundaries within which he can move. (or, by actually convincing others that his interpretation is the right one, which the kid obviously failed at, so that's a situation we can leave out of the discussion ;) )

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