Week 7 lunch meeting

[Dan Luu]

Is this happening?

[Jon Lewis]

Cody is on vacation and neither I nor Cory have done any of the lectures or work so lack much to talk about. We’re happy to show up and talk a bit but if there isn’t an interest from other people on meeting up, we may just skip it.

 

From: austin-scala...@googlegroups.com [mailto:austin-scala...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Dan Luu
Sent: Friday, November 09, 2012 10:43 AM
To: austin-scala...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Week 7 lunch meeting

 

Is this happening?

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Austin Scala Enthusiasts" group.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to austin-scala-enthu...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 

[Dan Luu]

My girlfriend just asked about lunch; since there's not that much interest, I'll just tag along with her.

I've got a few comments on the material, course, etc.

First, I take back my previous comment about this assignment looking like it's huge. I'm not sure if it's because I've actually learned something, or because it's easier, but it seemed much more straightforward than the past couple assignments.

The grading for the course seems funny to me. Apparently, you get a certificate for scoring >= 60%. As someone pointed out, you already get 20% for free from styleCheck. This week, I tried submitting as I was going along as 'free' testing, and you almost get 6 points (IIRC, it was something like 5.8) for doing everything up to the 'from' function, and the stuff before 'from' function is all simple little helper functions. At one point, while debugging my newNeighborsOnly (or whatever the pruning function is called), I tried skipping pruning entirely and still got 9 points. I suppose that's a function of the levels being tiny.

Short of just not doing a significant chunk of the assignments, it doesn't seem possible to not pass the class. I've never done any other graded online course. For those of you that have, are other ones similar? They made a big deal out of cracking down on cheating, but it's hard to imagine an employer caring about the certificate. It would be pretty easy to take 4-5 classes at once, do a half-assed job on all but 1 assignment, and submit 1 perfect assignment (the first one is probably easy for most courses), spending only a few hours a week and not learning anything at all. That you get a certificate for doing pretty much nothing at all seems like a bigger deal than the cheating that occurred, if they expect the certificates to be taken seriously. And, if not, who cares about cheating?

[John Cohorn]

I'm driving back to town right now myself and haven't done the last week's work yet. Meeting up next week would be nice though.

[Norman Richards]

On Fri, Nov 9, 2012 at 11:40 AM, Dan Luu <dan...@gmail.com> wrote:

Short of just not doing a significant chunk of the assignments, it doesn't seem possible to not pass the class. I've never done any other graded online course. For those of you that have, are other ones similar? They made a big deal out of cracking down on cheating, but it's hard to imagine an employer caring about the certificate. It would be pretty easy to take 4-5 classes at once, do a half-assed job on all but 1 assignment, and submit 1 perfect assignment (the first one is probably easy for most courses), spending only a few hours a week and not learning anything at all. That you get a certificate for doing pretty much nothing at all seems like a bigger deal than the cheating that occurred, if they expect the certificates to be taken seriously. And, if not, who cares about cheating?

Yes, the way the class is set up, you are pretty much going to get 10/10 or 0/10 for each assignment.  The certificate really is not very meaningful, which is why I argued that the no-sharing policy does more harm than good.  

The difference between this and other classes is that other classes tend to have exams/quizzes with no retries.  They are set up more like an actual courses.