Pride, academic standards and assessment

I've been off-blog lately (lost my server so lost my feed-on-feeds newsfeeds :-( ) and have also been struggling with my conscience. This year, to deter plagiarism, I've requested the early submission of a subsection of the work I usually have handed-in at the end of term (to check on progress and provided earlier feedback, ostensibly.) Because I'm keen on promoting web standards I warned the students I would expect valid XHTML and CSS in all their work. Most of 'em did validation in year 1 and this is year 2 so it was not an unreasonable thing to expect. So I gave 10 marks out of a possible 33 for valid XHTML in a particular exercise whose main point was to take some nasty old HTML4 and XHTML-ise it.

So far, so good, still many students lost the marks but it's 3% of one exercise out of 12 that'll form 40% of their final assessment, so overall the validation points are worth at most 1% of the final module mark (and probably less as the exercise was kinda trivial it'll receive a lower weight than the more complex JavaScript exercises later in the module.)

However one particular student was disappointed to lose those marks as he made a minor change to his work (in good faith) just before submitting it and it resulted in an invalid document. The change was laudable and garnered the two students (out of 140) who attempted it a few bonus marks, and so lost this student 6 marks overall due to the loss of validation. (So that's 6/33/12 of 40% or less than 1%.)

He requested that I explain why he got less then 100% for the exercise at the end of a lecture that finished early (4.30 PM rather than 5 PM) explaining that he knew I was probably tired but that it was what I got paid for, which I felt was unnecessarily combative IMO but I agreed and we spent some time wading through his mark-up whilst I explained my reasoning (which he already knew as I had published my marking scheme in lieu of direct, individual feedback.) I explained that as his mark-up was invalid XHTML it would lose the relevant marks but that his attempt to be clever had earned him some bonus points. He left after 20 minutes, I guess slightly abruptly, but I was tired and felt I'd done enough explaining to satisfy him.

Apparently not: he sent me an email a couple of hours later with a definitely chewed-over tone to it that annoyed me and took me an hour to reply to in a calm, reasonable tone -- pointlessly as it turned-out because I simply irritated him further and his second email just reiterated his position that he felt I was being unfair. So I spoke to him the next day at the start of his lab session and asked if he was OK with my decision regarding the points. This led to a further 20 minute discussion which I eventually terminated with no progress (after becoming increasingly upset by the student's attitude and attempts to use psychology on me.) My standpoint was that he submitted invalid XHTML so lost marks. His was that he'd tried to do something innovative that had led to the mistake and he'd felt under pressure due to the approaching deadline and had accidentally forgotten to re-validate the mark-up so he did not deserve to lose the marks and should be treated "as an individual".

Overall it was a major waste of both of our time and I learned a valuable lesson: sometimes it's pointless to explain/reason/whatever, don't bother, be dictatorial and say "That's the way it is." It saves time...

Faculty of Computing, Information Systems and Mathematics

Hooray! The Dean-designate has announced the new Faculty name and it is to be Computing, Information Systems and Mathematics ... inclusive, long and unfortunately close to "Fascism" as an acronym but a good compromise choice IMO.

In-class test

In-class test time, again. This year the Blackboard^® system behaved quite well (only 6 students out of 140 started their tests only to have them rejected when they'd finished this year ... unlike last year where dozens of problems occurred.) Sadly, this year's class average is much less than last year's :-( Happily one student got 98% <grin> so kudos to her ... sadly she's an outlier in the data!

Approachability

Sadly it seems I've lost the knack of appearing approachable this year :-(

Yesterday a group of students came to see me regarding my Web Tech. module because the chap they liked from last year who taught HTML was unavailable -- the spokesperson confessed that the others were unwilling to talk to me due to being scared(?!) Today there's an anonymous post on a discussion board complaining that the workload is too high this term ... but this 3^rd year is obviously also unwilling to talk to me about it... I don't feel more ferocious this year, perhaps they're more timid and I'd not noticed? Ah well, perhaps I'll reduce the lecture sarcasm next week...

Support procedures: "want, take, have"

2 weeks ago our ICT department informed me (via a roundabout route) that the server I administer seemed to have been infected with a trojan. I worked on removing it for a day or-so and heard nothing further from support so relaxed ... until today, 2 weeks later, I arrive at work to find that ICT have marched in and shut down the server without informing or asking anyone other than the Science tech. staff who have the key to the server room! A bit heavy-handed, in my opinion. So, the web pages hosted on the server, databases (student and mine), student work and lecture material are all gone¹ without so much as a by-your-leave :-( If we want access to their resources we ave to fill-in a form, submit it, wait 3-5 days, and hope. If they want something it's "want-take-have" (to misquote Faith in a certain episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer <grin>)

¹"OK, what about a backup?" you say. Sure ... it's backed-up, but the server is corrupt and the backup is on a system only that server can read (durrrrr...) I've a DAT tape backup too, but no PC-compatible DAT reader whilst our Science tech. is in sick-leave... <sigh>

HTML tables

Good article from 456 Berea Street on using HTML tables the way they were intended ... the definitive, complex description is in the W3C's HTML4 table documentation.

School of Maths + Computing and Information Systems = what?

Our Vice-Chancellor decided to merge us with CIS so what's the new faculty going to be called? One suggestion is "The Faculty of Informatics" but wtf does that mean to UK students?! My Polish colleague suggests it's a common-enough term on the continent but a quick survey of our students suggests they have no idea ... my preference is for something like "Faculty of Maths and Computing" or even "Faculty of Information Systems and Maths" (an "F-ism" <grin>) but I'm convinced that the "debate" that's being encouraged by management is a smoke-screen: we waste our effort arguing over relatively small issues while the management make all the important decisions without us and eventually (when we're worn down and permanently divided over this issue) they step-in with a "solution" that they had in mind all-along, getting it all done with the minimum of "moo". <sigh> but I hope I'm being too cynical and pray the University management will keep us all in the loop re. the new structure.

Coursework submission

I love coursework submission day :-) It makes the labs that follow the deadline so peaceful as the majority of students don't turn up, no doubt exhausted by the effort of creating 3 web pages, putting them in 3 separate folders and putting the lot in a ZIP file for submission... However I was truly impressed with a few students who turned up for the lab and managed to work through some exercises using the W3C's DOM node methods. Kudos to them, and a restful evening to the rest, fragile darlings! Now to get on with marking 120 sets of work :-(

Feedback and professionalism

Today we had our SSCC where student representatives get to (usually) air grievances and raise problems for our attention. It's a great forum, perhaps a bit slow having just one meeting per term but we are, usually, a friendly, open school that welcomes feedback. Feedback from my module seems to be that I've mistakenly given the impression that the DOM0 is old-fashioned (true) and useless (false), which is useful feedback but I'd have been happier to hear about it after a lecture so that I could correct the misapprehension immediately. Level 3 students also expressed the opinion that I'd asked them to read too much -- 1 chapter per week seems fine to me, perhaps it's the 3 chapters for their "reading week" (no lectures!) that they feel is excessive. I'd have expected final year students to be better at reading than second years, but apparently not... Ho hum.

Tidy applet

Wouldn't it be fun if someone compiled jtidy into an applet <grin>