The University of Stupidity

Firstly, let's all agree that this article is fictional and any similarities to persons, living or dead, or any real institutions are purely coincidental. If you don't agree; doesn't matter: Because I have said there aren't.

So my Uni annoys me. And I can't say bad things about it because I signed a little agreement saying that I would not bring the University into disrepute. It's an interesting little 'get-out' that my Uni has to stop us complaining about it in the press. It also means that we can be expelled for just about anything. And, somewhat surprisingly, that our degrees can be taken away from us at any point in our lives… or thereafter, if we bring the University into disrepute. Funny that. But my beef isn't really to do with the actual University, because I actually really like my Uni. No my problems are more to do with individuals.

My department has been a bit disorganised this year and we all feel a little mislead. Like we're all stumbling along without really understanding what it is we have to do, let alone how we are going to achieve it. I could go into several examples of this, but I just wanted to concentrate on the most recent one.

We were given a programming assignment which I wasn't totally into a couple of weeks ago. It was in Java, which we haven't been learning that long, but it was 'fill-in-the-blanks' programming. In principle I disagree with this method of teaching programming because it makes things too easy (how naive I can be). But in this instance, I was okay with it because it was as much about teaching us object oriented programming as anything else (where that sort of thing actually happens in real life).

But the code we were given was just such a weird design. It wasn't explained well and had only a few (often unhelpful) comments. And the explanatory document we were given really wasn't detailed enough. In fact, having now got the program working (I may post my solution in the programming section), I see that the solution is extortionately complicated and I can't believe he expected us to solve it. The fact that quite a few of us have just goes to prove we are indeed the fourth best computing course in the world.

So, we were given a big bunch of files and we had to figure out from the code in them how they worked together. If it was a good design, this wouldn't have been too hard. But I have now run the working version through a UML modeller and let me ask you this:

It certainly isn't straightforward. How on earth can we be expected to work that out? Anyway, a lot of our course seems to have gone along these lines: Being asked to do incredibly hard things without enough help. But hey, who said Uni would be easy?

— Nexami Engeo