Operation Systems at my university is a cursed course. I knew that before taking it. There is no professor at the university that does research within the field and so it’s assigned like a round of Russian Roulette. Every year a new professor. Every year they pull in some poor saps in their lab to help TA.
Knowing that, I still wanted to take it. It’s the first course where you learn details and apply parallel processing. Beyond that I wanted to know what made this wonderful machine I work on tick. So, silly as I was, I took it.
It became apparent that the prof didn’t care from the get go. He let us choose between two midterm dates and then assigned one different from both of them. One that was earlier. After we kicked and screamed, infuriated as we were, he postponed it. This was the first warning bell but I still thought I was smart enough to overcome it.
The first assignment was my July Crisis. Write a basic shell interpreter. I completed it to the best of my ability but it still had some bugs. I would say about 90% of the assignment criteria were met. This is one of those courses where the function of assigned grades was exponential. A B cost 10 hours of work. An A 100. I couldn’t afford the price, so I accepted that this was going to be a course where I had to settle for an A- if I was going to pass any of my other courses.
I got back my grade. An F. I was shocked and surprised. I must have not understood anything! I emailed the TA who graded the assignment, asking if he had office hours during which I can ask him questions. He responded that he had no patience for students wanting to persuade him for a higher grade.
I never reported him. I don’t even remember his name and don’t wish to deal with the headache of reporting him.
It turned out that he created 10 tests. That half of the tests required that piping be working flawlessly. That issues with piping was the 10% of my shell that didn’t work. (Correct piping on the assignment was written to be worth 10%). He would pass each test through and for each one that failed cut off 10%. Like a character in a video game fighting through a swarm of enemies. Detached. Ruthless. Uncaring. Didn’t care what the actual evaluation was and the evaluation didn’t seem to be moderated by the professor. Different TAs used different test cases.
I realized now why the course was cursed. I left the room unmotivated. Decided to dedicate 10 hours to the assignment because my grade between 10-100 hours would be the same one anyway, and stopped caring.
I barely scraped a passing grade and I was not the only one. To avoid embarrassment, they bell curved it and I ended the course with a B.
What could’ve been done?
I could’ve approached the professor. Told him about the incident and told him that his TA was not following the assessment criterion. Cutting corners with cheat codes.
I could’ve contacted my classmates and as a group, we could’ve filed a formal complaint. All of the complaints about this course are unofficial and told behind closed doors.
In terms of what the University can do: If a teacher has to use a bell curve repeatedly, then maybe that teacher is messing up on a grandiose level and things should be evaluated. Bell curves should be properly documented and brought to the attention of the university. There are a ton of courses in my university that are notoriously bell curved. Actions should be taken if something like this happens. Courses should not be serially bell curved.
This should be a warning sign that TAs and Profs should be assigned to courses. How can a course’s teaching team learn from their mistakes if they’re constantly getting swapped out? Each time is a first time and since each time is a hopeful last time, they’re not invested and they consider it a prison sentence through which they need to just bide their time through.
If a Prof sticks around then they can re-evaluate how long it takes to complete one of their assignments. They can do a survey where they ascertain how long it took each assignment to be completed and the respective grade the student got. If you see a major gap, that should be accounted for.
I thought a lot about this incident over the years. It made me really think about the importance of a teacher not only caring about the material but about the students. And for there to be motivations in place by academia to reward exceptional teachers. Right now, I don’t know if there exists any.