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 interest of democracy I asked my students in Computer Circuit Fundamentals - all fourth year engineering irregular students - about whether they wanted to have three exams throughout the term every four weeks, or four exams to be held every three weeks.

I was surprised that they picked the second option, because for them this means more opportunities for them to get a passing grade.

I would have thought, since they are mostly the ones who did not pass any assignments in my Energy Conversion lecture class recently, that they would think about it in terms of having less times to suffer during the entirety of the term. Are they maturing?

I also told them that their exam next week (at the end of the third week) would not be held in the laboratory but in one of the regular classrooms, would be open notes (allowing them also to print out all the programs they have made so far) but sharing of notes and opening of computers would not be allowed.

Asked if they wanted to choose between a hand-written programming exam or a programming analysis one, they - not surprisingly - chose the second one, and I warned them that this would include conversion of programs from flowchart to assembly language and vice versa, besides giving the output based on various inputs of a certain section of code. I wonder if, besides the students in the four groups that I always see and hear to be asking questions about how to finish their program exercises, any of the others will be able to pass.

It was the norm at the start, but not anymore, for the rest of the groups to follow suit and pass as soon as one group finished.

Maybe they realize that being dependent on the others they don't really learn.

I also had to talk to them about counter-intuitive user expectancy that may be easy to program, but is just not considered proper.

I'll give the details of that moral academic dilemma at another time.

Session 1659 is starting to think beyond shallow slacker excuses. Class dismissed.