Uni’s: They aint what they used to be..
Alternatively titled, “I want my weekend back”.
Going to Uni costs a shitload of green, and it’s all for what, I ask?
Local students pay a lot. Overseas students pay a lot more.
Lecturers seem to teach both groups ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. (I wish I could get paid as much as they do just to hand out a few photocopies lecture notes and tell people to ‘read chapter 7‘).
They’ll probably argue back with some bullshit about ‘laying down the basics, then promoting disciplined self learning’, but is that really what they should be getting paid for?
For that amount of money i’d expect to be taught the subject, properly. I want class discussions, examples on the board, and most importantly – any problems that individuals are having to be ‘worked through’ with the rest of the class.
But sadly, no.
Louis and I spent the whole weekend – and I don’t just mean just the normal waking hours – trying to finish off his database assignment. Granted, he did have two weeks to do this, but he didn’t think it was this ‘big’ (nor did I at a glance) and he was busy getting his other assignments done, concurrently.
The project was along the lines of creating a bunch of database tables (and linking them) to create a nomination / voting application for some theoretical academy awards, with real data.
So quite a few hours were spent on working out the tables needed, then the fields, then what links to what. Then more time getting enough information to fill all these tables. Just for fun, the database for usage was an Oracle database. That means it’s not a free thing to download, just to make it more painful. (How do you test what you’ve created?)
Luckily we (well not really me, personally) use Oracle at work, so we went and fetched my laptop from work. Thank god for VPN, I was able to hook up from home to one of the development databases.
Then came more fun, trying to get the data out for the queries we had to run for the assignment questions, and lastly, making some ‘creation’ files that the lecturer runs to make sure you did everything right.
Oh, and almost forgot – copious amounts of fucking step-by-step documentation, just to make sure you know what you’re doing. (Ha! As if, I had NFI!)
We only finished about half of it. I had no idea how to make triggers or stored procedures, and we had to deal with some weird Oracle idiosyncracies in the process too.
If Louis gets a bad mark, that lecturer is gonna taste rubber. (Off my car tyre.)
16.Oct.06 
Bitching, Home, Web / Programming
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