This is a enormous failure of the teacher. The kid should have talked it a supervisor, because any teacher should be able to look beyond their own ignorance of the subject of a student's project and instead ask questions about the thought process the student used in making their project, and given a grade based on that.
There are two sides to that story. There's quite a bit going on that has been left out. England's school system really doesn't work in a way that teachers can just hand out whatever grade a student "deserves".
The kid was handed a syllabus, a marking scheme and told "if you do this you'll get an A". He threw out the mark scheme and did his own thing.
He then tried to get an A for doing whatever the hell he wanted.
I applaud him for pursuing his own interests and taking charge of his own learning - I really do - but the system doesn't allow for that.
You don't hand in creative writing and expect to get a math credit. You don't hand in physics to your chemistry teacher.
I wish the system in England were different. Maybe I'd still be teaching there if it were, but you're casting a lot of aspersion and judgement on a subject that you don't seem to know much about.
The brief is just that. The mark scheme undoubtedly suggests a more restrictive approach into how you produce a project in line with that brief.
It's like listening to the first sentence your client utters ("I want a program to calculate my expenses...") and then creating Excel when all they wanted was a calculator. For better or worse, it's not about doing whatever you like, and hiding behind the brief when there was a more detailed set of specs is immature.
You are assuming that there was a more detailed spec. that asked for something different to what he did. There's no indication of that in the article, you're just inventing things to prop up your argument.
I'm assuming? I did the same course that student did. The curriculum hasn't changed towards 'we won't tell you what you need to score the marks' - quite the opposite. It was like this 6 years ago and it was like this a years ago when my coworker showed me his mark scheme for a similar curriculum-mandated ICT project.
> There's no indication of that in the article
Because if there was, it would severely weaken his whole 'I'm surrounded by idiots' argument, wouldn't it? Good for the kid for making a cool app, but he has to learn that you don't get judged on your merits but by how successfully you complete your task.
Have you had any experience with GCSE ICT? As far as I am concerned, there is one person making judgments with less information and that person is you. Let's not forget you are seeing one side of the story - don't be so foolish and pretend it's the whole truth.
You can even view the mark schemes online! Here is but one exam board that does this:
It's amazing how I am ignorantly downvoted for something that is common knowledge among schoolchidren, seeing as they are given a mark scheme for every piece of coursework in every subject they take. I can only assume these people aren't from the UK...
> The curriculum hasn't changed towards 'we won't tell you what you need to score the marks'
I never said it did. It's perfectly possible to have a spec. that allows for more than one type of implementation. This is schoolwork, not NASA. The aim is to show that they understand the concepts and can produce results. Exact requirements aren't necessary for that.
From the spec. on the site you linked to - it seems Unit 4: Creating Digital Products is the relevant unit:
> > They can choose what sort of product to design and make, but it must include an appropriate user interface and user input must determine the outputs that are produced.
It seems to me there's a lot of freedom for students to choose implementation platform and language. While your school in particular might have been more specific in what you should build (and really, given the limitations of teacher knowledge, that makes sense), it doesn't follow that his must have been similarly restrictive. Unless you were literally in the same class as him, you aren't in a position to know what was asked of him, and your assumptions directly contradict the article.
> > There's no indication of that in the article
> Because if there was, it would severely weaken his whole 'I'm surrounded by idiots' argument, wouldn't it?
My point is that without further information, you aren't in a position to say that he ignored the spec. The article's direct statements trump your assumptions.
> As far as I am concerned, there is one person making judgments with less information and that person is you.
The only thing I have stated in my comments thus far relates to what is directly stated in the article and what you are saying. I'm not making assumptions, all I'm doing is pointing out you are doing so.
Right, first off, you are citing the brief and claiming that this is the basis on which people are marked. This is the very mistake I stated in the grandparent post and that you are making again. Stop claiming I am making 'assumptions' when you obviously have no clue as to the facts. The mark scheme is found under the 'Detailed unit content' section and that specifies a lot of things you need to do in addition to simply 'making a product'.
> without further information, you aren't in a position to say that he ignored the spec
So if you read between the lines in the student's statement, where in this did he say he did anything other than write some code? And you're accusing me of making assumptions?
> The article's direct statements trump your assumptions.
So find me the statements which show he actually did all the legwork you are required in the class. You are completely wrong here.
> From the spec. on the site you linked to - it seems Unit 4: Creating Digital Products is the relevant unit
It's not in fact the relevant unit, as there are several exam boards he could have used. That was given as an example (was in fact my coworker's unit). The brief actually matches OCR's ICT course (section 2.4):
Note how there is no requirement as to how to implement it. But also note how there is no requirement for candidates to show their code, even!
The student says:
> I argued the case and managed to scrape a pass by teaching him the basics of Objective-C from scratch and by commenting every single line of code I wrote to explain exactly what it did and how it did it (all 3,400 lines, including standard libraries I used) which ended up being a huge time sink.
This kid didn't read the mark scheme or he would know that you are not asked to comment the code, nor does doing so confer any direct proof that you can do any of the things that spec says you should demonstrate.
You're meant to show designs for the different parts of your programs, you're meant to demonstrate that you wrote code and that it does what you say it does, and you're meant to establish a testing procedure and document the outcome, among other things.
What you do NOT do is comment your code and call it a day. I know because I tried doing precisely that in my own project and was told "we don't want code, we want documentation". When the teacher says he doesn't have a clue how it works, it's because he was given a code dump. Documenting it so that a non-programmer can understand what you are doing is tedious but that is what you're being asked here.
I thought the same. But then I thought that a supervisor is probably going to understand even less than the teacher, which just biases them even more to siding with the teacher. It's hard enough to get people on your side when they don't understand what you know; it's even harder when they don't even understand how you could possibly understand.
That said I don't think he couldn't have done better. I don't think I'd have done the tedium of commenting every line of code; I'd rather write a script that just parsed out the doc of every function call and pasted it next to the function call.
