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Admin
But did he teach them how to tighten up the graphics on level 3?
Admin
LOL, that's great!! Makes me glad I'm done school :)
Admin
Reminds me of a course where we had to write a linear programming (LP) solver as the project. The lectures were straight copies from an old (very theoretical) textbook, gone through verbatim. Fortunately one of us students was a guru on the topic, helping us to finish the project more or less as given. Later that student became a professor of mathematics at another university.
Admin
I think this was originally a sidebar.
http://forums.worsethanfailure.com/forums/post/114530.aspx
Note from Alex: Good find, Kerin submitted the story directly to me and I must have missed his SideBar post. As a general note, keep in mind that submissions take at least 1-2 months to be published. I try to respond to inquiries much faster though, so feel free to email me if you're interested in the status of your submission.
Admin
Seen it, but this sounds pretty much exactly what happened with me and a lecturer from Kazakhstan in my local community college. Lucky for him he went back to Kazakhstan and I am too lazy to sue him for copyright infringement.
Admin
Me fail English? That's unpossible! :-)
Admin
This is much more common in the college world than we think.
Happened to one of my friends 25 years ago: did a project for a local DoD research lab supervised by a Professor, with said Professor being the middle man between student and lab.
He got suspicious when Professor insisted on getting the source code himself. Phoned the lab, where researchers were astonished to discover Professor had a helper. The distinguished gentleman had attributed all the merit to himself.
A happy ending ensued: Professor was bypassed, later lost his bid for deaconship (we saw to it), and my friend turned his project into a multi-million dollar company that he sold to Baan.
Admin
I knew it... Thought I was losing my mind. Either that or I could see the future.
Admin
I once had a professor "on loan" from the IT department of my college. He never taught a class in his life and only had a good rep for knowing Java. Our final project was to create an P2P version of some game he played (Go or Wiki?) complete with chat rooms, game replays, forums, and any other cool thing he thought up. Oh yeah, we had to code it all from scratch, including the p2p Message protocall. My group got as far as the basic game play and we still got an A in the course.
BTW: The school I went to was the major state school in the state I live in (starts with 'M')
Admin
I was wondering the same thing :)
Admin
Exploiting entry-level students for profit... ah, the joys of tenure!
Admin
I knew I'd seen it before, with slightly differant middle (was real company not some dummy company).
Admin
Had something similar happen to me as well. Project was to build a simple job information posting system for the college's career center. Nothing fancy, but it worked. Spent the next 6 months telling the college that any changes/additions were not going to be free, as the work was no longer for a class. Site remained up for about a year, and they took it down because there was no one willing to maintain it for free.
Admin
captcha: alarm (I should say so!)
Admin
You're the man now, dog.
Admin
On the non-coding front... I took a new course taught by two professors - one tenured and heavily published, the other almost at the point of tenure. Everybody was surprised that the tenured prof, who normally only taught grad level courses and did research, would honor we mere undergrads with his presence.
There did not yet exist a textbook that covered the material, so the two supplied the class an old textbook (written by one of them) somewhat related to the class subject, along with assorted magazine articles, studies, white papers, etc.
During the first class, the tenured prof told us that a copy of our notes would be required at the end of the semester. The non-tenured prof then joked "yeah - I'll need them to write the textbook that will be used in the class next year." I thought the tenured prof would break his neck turning to the other to give him the evil eye. He was honoring us with his presence for the sole purpose of gathering textbook-writing material.
Admin
The rwtf is that Kerin didn't team up with dummy company to press fraud charges.
Admin
Sadly, this behavior isn't limited to the IT world. In the school of Landscape Architecture at my university, we had a professor very much like Professor Lawrence for one of our design classes. The project I was assigned to was a sculpture garden for a prominent museum in the area. An exciting project. There were three groups working on this project, and we all had some impressive design elements. We all got pretty good grades.
Then I went to revisit the museum a couple years later: The fountain design from Group 1, the path design from Group 2 and a patio area as designed by Group 3 -- and a little plaque at the beginning of the garden crediting my professor for the design.
Admin
Personally I keep to the standard practices with my students:
Admin
Excellent point.
Admin
Web Design 101?? Was this a trade school? If it was a distinguished university, I would hope it's merely an elective, and outside of the computer science department, and taught by a TA and not a professor. It could even be a side-project in a databases course, or a self-study project, etc. Sheesh, what's next, "Wordprocessing 101"?
But then, CS departments have always been under immense pressure from the corporate world to conform to fashion. Ie, Megacorp complains "Why are you teaching algorithms and computability to these students? We don't need engineers or scientists who can think, we need IT grunts who can keep our e-commerce running. We're going to have to rethink that new building we promised to pay for."
Admin
Why bother? Like the prof has any money that he didn't drink??
Admin
I sort of did the same thing when I was a teaching assistant, but I was up front about it. I had a rather complex graduate project to complete, and no time to do it.
I decided that I would break the thing up into a bunch of tiny black boxes (pre-OO) with defined inputs, outputs and behaviors. The class I was TA'ing in had 350+ students, and was graded by totaling scores from all assignments and tests. I told the teacher, and then offered an extra 10 points to anyone who could successfully complete one of my black box programming assignments - no limit.
A few of the more enthusiastic kids saw it as a chance to pass the class without taking the midterm or final, and did so. Since the programming work involved stuff that was a bit beyond the scope of the class, they wound up learning quite a bit, and I got my project done without having to write anything more than a main driver, a few factories and a bunch of test cases. - Symbiotic !!!
Admin
To address the point about why tenure exists, in the original article:
Actually, let me just steal from Wikipedia's article on tenure:
Yes, there are obviously problems with tenure -- when you have no one to answer to, you might also go off the deep end and pursue useless nonsense, but that's apparently an acceptable risk.Admin
In Spanish universities the "norm" is that most of the final career projects, an special project carried during the last year, is always a project that the professor has sold to a customer. Even when the alumn has its own idea for the project.
It's ilegal, but most of the time is take it or don't pass.
Admin
Oh my god! The same exact thing happened to me when my roommate and I built a 5 megawatt laser for our professor who then sold it to the government! When a classmate of ours built a target-tracking system from a large mirror, we knew we had to stop them!
Admin
Slightly off-topic but I had a similar experience in high school. The guy didnt know how to teach the CAD drafting class and instead of telling us how to do something, he would say "Look it up and when you figure it out come tell me. You'll never learn if I tell you the answer all the time." So when someone would figure out the answer, we'd write it out, print it up and put it on the wall.
Took me a couple weeks to figure out he didnt know what the hell he was doing. He wasn't using our answers for any of his own work, so it wasnt quite as bad, but he just didnt know what he was doing. Then when I took a second CAD course with a different teacher he was amazed that we had no idea how to do the simplest things.
Admin
"Yes, there are obviously problems with tenure -- when you have no one to answer to, you might also go off the deep end and pursue useless nonsense, but that's apparently an acceptable risk." Check out http://www.improbable.com/ the section on Ig Nobel prizes, for some of the really fun "off the deep end" stuff. (Good things come out of going off the deep end too, but this is so much more fun to read about.)
Admin
No, the real WTF is that he didn't licence his code. All the decent students at my uni licensed all their assignment submissions... ranged from full copyright thru GPL to BSD, depending on what the student wanted. If a prof ever pulled a stunt like this, they could potentially haul his ass over the coals... or they could be fine with it (and would've given prior consent in their licence, with/without attribution as they see fit).
Admin
I think that guy is pretty smart as far as a HS teacher goes. I doubt he applied at the school as a CAD expert. Chances are he was a History buff or a coach and was assigned the class. He made you all do the work while he reviewed the next week's opponent's offensive line formations.
Admin
Was it a moral imperative?
Admin
I am not exactly sure what you are trying to say here. Are you trying to say that there is no theory behind the concept of design? Or perhaps you are trying to say that there is no theory behind the concept of client server technology?
I don't know what this class entailed (other than making extra money for the professor as a consultant) but web design doesn't exist in a vaccuum. I'm sure you could write plenty of PHD Thesis on web design...
Granted if more people took web desing classes, we might have fewer WTF's.
Admin
...or maybe Karin was a design student...
Sheesh... not everything that has to do with computers requires a CS degree...
Admin
Long after I received my BS in Comp Sci and began working as a full-time software engineer and web developer, I went back for my MS. The intro to web development course started with some basic html, css, and cgi. Then, it was announced that we would be split into groups and given a "client" who would provide us with some "real life" site requirements. At that point, things started to smell funny. We were told, under no circumstances, were we to use the college's webspace for hosting these projects. That's when it started to outright stink. When we presented a list of webhosts and their respective fees, the "client" balked and said they weren't paying anything for hosting. We designed the site, managed to cover the outrageous requirements, made a far more advanced site than the course had covered (only because half our group did this professionally), and I put the "project" up on my personal webspace for contracting projects.
After getting my final grade, I removed the project from my webspace and immediately got a flood of emails from the "client" and instructor. When I went to the professor's university homepage to get her phone number, I saw a link to her resume. On it were links to all of the sites she had developed. Lo and behold, the "recent work" had all of the class "clients" listed, along with a broken link to my domain.
I forwarded all the email communication to the dean, reminding him that academic work is the property of the student, and haven't heard a peep from the instructor or "client" since.
captch: ninjas (indeed)
Admin
BRILLIANT!
Admin
At my university, the web design classes were taught as a part of the communications department. There's a bit of HTML in the electives involving web programming, but it's generally assumed the students will learn it on their own.
One communications prof of my acquaintance actually ran a little side business farming out students to work on contracts doing web monkey stuff. The vast majority of the students were communications majors, or at any rate weren't in the CS program. This led to some pretty horrible scenarios - at one point, he lamented to me that since they were migrating a db backend from mSQL to MySQL, he had to edit every last page on his site.
Because they all had embedded Perl in them.
And they all had the DBI connection string, as well as a hard coded SQL statement.
And he didn't know how to fix it using awk or some other regexp tool.
shudder
Admin
You hear that?... SWWOOOOSHHHH-------
That was the meaning of the post passing right over your head.... think pop corn.
Captcha: yummy... like pop corn
Admin
You hear that?... SWWOOOOSHHHH-------
That was the meaning of the post passing right over your head.... think pop corn.
Captcha: yummy... like pop corn
Admin
Interestingly enough yes you're right. That is definitely not why he was hired and I think he just fell into it. He was a nice guy but to this day I still think its hilarious that he has zero clue what he's doing.
Admin
I have to say that I've never seen that happen in any of the courses I've taken. One course had us redesign the system for the campus bookstore with end-of-term presentations to the class, prof and bookstore staff. Nothing plagiarized, nothing surreptitiously "adopted". How do I know? I went back for a couple of additional courses and the bookstore was still, uh, "challenged".
OTOH, I had a data structures course early on. I can -- many years later -- remember watching the prof develop an algorithm (one I'm sure he had developed every time he taught the course) and then seeing him pick up bits and chunks of code saying things like "Well, these two are the same except for the sign" and "Hmmm, these look similar except for this bit here" and gradually collapse the rather large piece of code into an exquisitely tight piece of code and I remember looking at the final result and thinking "Wow! That is so elegant!" He got tenure a year or so later and truly deserved it.
His doctoral thesis was on resolution of ambiguity (you could look it up, I suppose). Here's one of the issues he was trying to resolve:
Find the first "*" before the "C": A * B * * C
Admin
Admin
Ummm... "it's a moral imperative" is a line from that movie.
Admin
Admin
Oh, bosh.
Tenured professors are not "unfirable".
Professors are tenured for a number of reasons, partially as a reward for many years of hard academic work, including lots and lots of publications, but mostly as a way of protecting professors who may take unpopular or unorthodox views from retaliation.
Professional misconduct is another thing entirely.
If a professor showed up in class falling down drunk or otherwise abused their position, there are definite methods for revoking tenure and/or removing the professor from the faculty. I've seen it happen.
It's not pretty, but firing someone rarely is.
This story, if true, is a textbook case of academic misconduct and the faculty senate would have made short work of "Professor Lawrence" if the facts were made known. Far too often, incompetents are allowed to remain in place because of bureaucratic interia, complacency, and misunderstanding of the meaning of tenure.
As for abusing students by stealing their work, yes, that sometimes happens as well, but that usually happens at the graduate level. The late Gary Kildall, who was one of the pioneers in the microcomputer world, was a professor in computer science (I don't recall whether he was tenured or not) at the US Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. He was developing an operating environment for one of the first microcomputer, the 8080, which went on to become CP/M.
Some of his graduate students were reported to have grumbled that some of the code in CP/M looked awwwwwfulllly similar to work they'd done for their thesis projects.
I, of course, cannot verify this to be true but I am the personal acquaintence of several folks who worked with Kildall at Digital Research or NPS and have been known to make similar claims.
Admin
Was popcorn ultimately involved?
Admin
As your post lacked "the REAL WTF here is" you don't win the trifecta of stupid.
Admin
Sadly enough, all students at my college were required to take a semester long course that boiled down to using Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Access. This included the IT and CS folks as well.
Admin
Sadly, yes.... I feel like crap now. although i watched it in spanish.
Admin
Without job security, the scholarly community as a whole might favor "safe" lines of inquiry.
And safe doesn't just mean "uncontroversial" or "politically correct"; tenured professors can pursue research which has only a small chance of yielding any new ideas or any useful ideas, or which may take decades to complete. There are ways, at least in theory, to get rid of tenured professors who neglect their teaching duties or who plagiarize or the like. These rules need to be enforced. But you don't want (OK, I don't want) colleges to be able to get rid of a professor just because their research isn't trendy enough or raking in the grant money.
Admin
You have your string.
The string consists of an A followed by anything folowed by a B followed by anything followed by some more anything followed by a C.
AAAAAAAAAAAABBBBBBBBBBBC = true A( * )B( * *) C so * * = BBBBBBBBBB so which of the B's belong to the first asterix and which to the second.
I think thats what the problem is. Its been a while since i dealt with that.