I'm starting to appreciate the development tools that come built into linux, getting GCC onto my OS X machine was fairly annoying (I had to download the 2 gig Xcode first)
also >.<
tl;dr: A big long rant about Psyc2400
So there's been a hooplah over a course for second year psyc, psyc2400, aka Biological Psychology. Actually that's probably putting it too nicely. There's been a shitstorm.
Basically, a lot of people got marks back for an assignment, and they were unjustifiably low. And because they were so late in returning our marks, a large number of students who would have withdrawn from the course (to preserve their GPA) now cannot do so - they just have to wear these marks. This is poor management of a course that people are paying money for.
For this assignment, there was *no* marking criteria (you can instantly tell a competent lecturer vs an incompetent one, the competent one understands how to teach effectively and will always give you a marking criteria for assignments), this meant that people were effectively writing lab reports with absolutely no idea what the markers wanted. To make matters worse, whenever I asked my almost comically incompetent pair of tutors a question about it (They were unable to balance an equation correctly, and put down the resultant errors as rounding off problems. This is pretty basic year 10 maths people..), they were unable to answer my questions, or gave vague ones that smelt like "I dont actually know"
The coordinator made available an alternate assignment for those who didnt' get the lab report results, an essay on language. Now after writing about 50,000 lab reports in the last two years, and the fact that the lab report assignment looked like load of horseshit, I emailed the coordinator and asked politely if I could do the essay. He said yes.
I got 95 for the essay, whereas every other student who did the lab report seems to have gotten 40-65. Dont get me wrong, I feel like I should have gotten a decent mark, I worked hard on the essay, it was 2000 words (making it a far bigger assignment then the basic lab report) and language is a personal area of interest to me, and I made sure it was very polished, but I dont think it deserved a 95%. Maybe 85-90. Infact getting such a high mark for it makes me feel like whoever marked it didn't even have a close look at it.
This unfortunately is not an isolated incident that is the tragicomedy of errors that is Psyc2400:
- The two main lecturers (#1 and #2, #2 is the course coordinator) appear to have zero communication between them.
- The lecture slides for lecturer #1 were never up in time, and when they were, they would frequently be incorrect as Lecturer #1 had made adjustments to them. Seriously how long have you been teaching this course? Get organised.
- The lecture slides and lab manual contained a litany of errors, ranging from the egregious spelling errors in every second slide to factual inaccuracies. In one slide, the cranial nerves were not labelled correctly. Then, the correction posted later was not correct, so there was a correction to the correction, and this was on a slide that HE TOLD US TO MEMORISE. Thanks dickhead.
- Lecturer #2 simply does not have the English skills to teach effectively. I've seen this before. What happens is everyone has this strange belief that it's somehow politically incorrect to tell someone that they suck at English. Sure it's rude, but it's even more rude to allow someone to make a giant fool out of themselves. I estimate I understood maybe 60% of what he said, no where near enough to learn the material. Two hours = wasted.
- The markers/lecturers are fucking lazy. We did our first assignment in week 4, and didn't get it back until the last week of the holidays. That's SEVEN WEEKS TO MARK A MULTIPLE CHOICE TEST. Then we didnt' get our second assignment back until TWO DAYS before the final exam, too late to pull out if you bombed at it
- Lecturer #2 would frequently make excuses that he was busy with honours years students, and this was an excuse for his tardiness in relation to replying to students' questions. What are you, a 14 year old? Let me explain time management to you: Time is a finite resource, when you allocate it to something, you dont magically get more of it elsewhere. If you take on the responsibility of looking after honours years students or other courses (I'm going on the daring premise here that you are in fact, not a slave, and not under duress because your daughter is being held hostage in a bunker in afghanistan) Then people will assume that taking on this responsibility means you have the time to do a good job at it. University courses are touchstones to our future careers. Treating it like a hobby is fucking insulting to all of us.
- This course was by far the most expensive out of the four we did this semester. By a large margin.
- We have received NO FEEDBACK for ANYTHING. Just extremely late marks. What areas do I need to focus on for the exam? Who knows. I have no feedback!
- The blackboard site is insanely disorganised, it's incredibly difficult to find anything.
What's happened as a result of the huge number of complaints? An email this morning says apparently some psyc coordinators are going to sit down with the coordinators from Pysc2400 and tell them how naughty they've been and slap them on the wrist.
Ideally the solution is to remove lecturer #2 from being the course coordinator for *anything*. But you're stupid if you think that will ever happen - I've heard students from years above complaining about how terrible he is. If any of the powers that be at Newcastle uni had the balls to do something about it, it would have happened already. Think about it, you try to fire him because of communication issues, he turns around and slaps you wtih a discrimination lawsuit. It simply wont happen.
I think I'm cross about it because I *really* like biological psychology, but undertaking this course was like receiving a christmas present, and finding a chunk of coal inside. Blah.
