Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

In the first meeting of my Computer Systems Organization lab class for the seventh week of the third term (it’s midterms week already!) I gave them the ultimatum to finish their alternative gates experiment, including the three-input and four-input Boolean circuits.

I told them that if they still had not finished all of those by the end of the period, they would have to schedule make up sessions to complete them, because on the next meeting, we would be starting on a new experiment.

It was only then that the students decided to start counting chickens before they were hatched, and asked how many points each finished circuit was.

Since the for each experiment there were two or three functions given each, and in the first ones they were supposed to make the circuit for the function and its complement, while for the alternative gates they were supposed to make either all NAND gates or all NOR gates, and each experiment is worth fifteen points, then that means that each circuit can have either three point twenty five or two point five points each.

So the groups began to compute how many circuits they can afford not to make but still have a safe passing mark (assumed to be at sixty percent, when it is supposed to be seventy percent for engineering labs even if they are not engineering majors) in each experiment.

It’s not the first time that I have seen such behavior – some students make the estimations while in the middle of an exam, even asking the teacher for the point breakdown if it is not given in the paper.

And personally I do not approve of such “minimum effort” but what other positive motivation can I give in the face of such except that “the more work they do the higher their grade is”?

Sometimes rushed work doesn’t even equate their best output, so there really has to be a good compromise between time and quality, having too long a deadline the students have the tendency to keep putting off the job.

Session 1003 has to do the rest of the experiment because his first efforts got rated very low. Class dismissed.