I have lost my faith in humanity.

Here it is, your moment of Zen. That or I just finished grading the first round of CS4 projects. For those of you who are familiar with the project, the first submission is usually awful, averaging somewhere around a low C or high D. Well, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, this year makes past years look like the honor roll. So, without further ado, here we go.

To start, let me explain something. We’ve switched the project this quarter, as in the project they used for about 4 years is no longer in use. Anyone who has taken the class in the past remembers the puzzle solver, right? Well, now it is a bit harder, as it is a game position evaluator. The restrictions on the type of game make the evaluation about as simple as possible (a well-written solution for the first part of the project should be around 60 lines of actual code, total), but the concepts for this type of solver are more complex than that of a simple breadth-first search. With this project, you actually have to use (gasp!) recursion. For the interested, here’s the project page.

So, the moral of this is: I suppose we shouldn’t be too hard on these guys. The first submission is due at the end of week 4, and many people are struggling with syntax, standard libraries, and project concepts all at once. It is a bit of a tall order, and I keep reminding myself that. Unfortunately, as it stands, I’ve still lost faith in the entirety of humanity. Now, to see why.

Here is the grade breakdown and (meaningful?) statistics:

A -  2
B - 10
C -  6
D -  4
F - 18 (2 as no submission)
Average:            11.78 pts, 47% (F)
Standard Deviation:  9.47 pts, 38%
Median:             15.50 pts, 62% (D)
Mode:                   0 pts,  0% (F)

…and this is why I’m now huddled in the corner of my room, in the fetal position, crying and rocking myself to sleep. Tell me you wouldn’t do the same. Please. Tell me what the appropriate response is to something like this.

Sean spent at least two full classes talking about the project. We both spent all weekend answering barrages of questions. We offered design advice and explained common pitfalls. Sean effectively gave the code for finding next moves for the first submission, and he went over the evaluator in such detailed pseudocode and explanation that the code should have been nearly 1-to-1 with what he was saying.

So I give up. I’m going to ask Sean to grade the lab this week so I can take a mental break from it. I gotta tell you, after so many quarters of grading for CS4, I’m starting to doubt the efficacy of the CS program in general.

This is my plea: for the love of god and all that is holy, somebody please restore my faith in humanity.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 2nd, 2006 at 11:29 pm and is filed under general, grading. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Gatacoma 2 years ago 1 point
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An old saying I know goes: "When in trouble, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout"

Might help, might not.

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Dumont 2 years ago 1 point
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After grading CS4 for 5 weeks I'm already doubting the effectiveness of our CS program. I had a CS3 student ask me why his constructor couldn't return data and I've had more questions that the students should already know the answers to than I could ever imagine. Its going to be a long rest of my RIT career as a grader......

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Harezga 2 years ago 1 point
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Noah, I am sorry that we did this to you.

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Paul Solt 2 years ago 1 point
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I think it's time to ease up a bit, or have 2 C++ programming courses so that you don't hit them so hard with the big CS4 project.

We're expecting a lot out of them and I think theres problems with switching from java to C++ and there are problems with the conceptual solutions that you're asking them to produce. Granted your almost giving them the psuedo-code, however it doesn't mean anything if they can't understand it.

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noah 2 years ago 1 point
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Very much true, Paul. When we asked Sidney to change it, we meant we wanted a different project, but not a vastly more difficult project. Of course, "difficult" to Sidney and "difficult" to the rest of humanity are different beasts.

I also agree on the two C++ courses. Originally, they did have two - CS4 and SE. The SE department changed this without informing the CS department, and the CS department was left up in the air about it. I understand that learning a new language poses difficulties, and learning the new paradigms of C++ is equally difficult.

I'm not entirely convinced that the problem is that of the courses or the content, though. I've watched a steady decline in first project grades in the past 3 years, while at the same time watching Sean spend more and more class time explaining the project. During this time, the project didn't get any harder. I don't know that it is statistically meaningful, but it does scare me.

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Paul Solt 2 years ago 1 point
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Is the problem also a result of RIT accepting too many Computer Science majors who aren't prepared to problem solve? Or are the students too lazy to think for themselves?

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