Potty Page

March 3, 2006

Another waste of time "Friday Lab"!

Yeah, so last week I had 3 people come and do labs.

This week it was marginally better. Maybe. One guy came in and just wanted to check if the work he'd done at home was on the right sort of lines and would I accept it when it came to marking it. 'twas ok, although there were some things I didn't like about it - I pointed out the errors of his ways and sent him off happy!

Then in came two dudes from Slovenia or was it Slovakia, I forget... anyways... they've brought in a laptop with their work to show me.

So, the first ones code worked, but there were millions of things that wouldn't make me give them them the lab - just clumsy programming, which pretty much everyone who I've seen does - I don't think I've seen anyone who has worked out how to compare two fractions without having to resort to making them both floating point numbers and comparing - yeah it's the easy way out, but what if floating point precision gets in the way (0.499999999999 isn't 0.5).

Then came the look at the second guys code - I asked him if he'd done similar errors to the other guy, so I didn't need to explain them all to him... he had made the same errors... the exact same errors, with code which if diffed with the other guy's code would probably only result in the authour's name having been changed.

Ah well. How blatant?

I don't think I'm gonig to moan too much as they're both on a "No Award" exchange scheme thingy so it's not as if their marks actually matter for shit.

Then there were two people who wanted their second lab marking... not on my life.

"But but but, we were told by the lecture that because of the mixup with the computers and the labs and stuff that he'd extended the deadline..."
"only for lab 1... and that was last week. Lab one was due two weeks ago, and you managed to do that one..."
"Hmph"
"Go and see the lecturer, worst he'll do is tell you to piss off for being cheeky"
"OK"
"So, are you staying to do this lab?"
"We don't have the notes, we missed yesterday's lecture, where can we get them from."
"Ah ha"

I'm beginning to see why they've missed the deadline for the lab... 'cause they don't go to the lectures to find anything out!

Then there was another dude who seemed logically challenged, he was there for ages but at least it gave me something to do and he left know what it was all about :-)

So, six is better than 3, even though two of them were drongos with nothing to show me... well OK, they had stuff to show me, I just refused to look!

Posted by Ed at March 3, 2006 1:46 PM | PhD |