What the hell is going on in COMP 2450?
Over literally the first few weeks of the semester, my professor made multiple severe factual errors about Java that demonstrated a CONCERNING lack of understanding of the material.
Without getting too specific, he:
- Incorrectly explained what the
voidreturn type does (an embarrassingly basic Java concept) - Admitted he "hadn't read" the instructions for the SINGLE SEMESTER LONG ASSIGNMENT when students asked about specific requirements??? This is the ONLY ONE we are given in the course.
- Said he "didn't understand" the university's "culture" around providing students with material explaining what TYPES OF QUESTIONS to expect on tests. We had almost no idea what the test would look like.
I thought it couldn't get much worse after these first few weeks, but somehow, it did!
The teaching staff have now RANDOMLY decided to reverse a diagramming convention (UML, this is all we've been doing so far in the course) that we were taught at the BEGINNING OF THE SEMESTER and have been using ever since. We've already completed an entire term test and part of the project using the original convention???
I couldn't find a SINGLE EXAMPLE of anyone using this reversed convention online. This isn't some debatable stylistic preference, there isn't even a crumb of evidence that anyone in the ENTIRE industry has done these diagrams like this on the entire internet. This "convention" entirely changes what the diagram means. The university just decided to change to teaching it wrong just for the hell of it.
Worse yet, this potentially puts us at risk of losing marks on tests for using the convention we were originally taught. Yes, they said they "wouldn't take off marks for the drawn test diagrams," but a huge chunk of the test involved INTERPRETING diagrams. That assurance doesn't address whether students could be penalized for interpreting relationships according to the convention they originally learned.
On top of that, we're being forced to REDO AND RESUBMIT our Phase 1 diagram (???) and wait TWO WHOLE WEEKS for reassessment. This is a cumulative project where each phase depends on the previous one, so the increased delay makes it hard to work on the next part.
And to make matters worse, we're being PENALIZED for this forced Phase 1 resubmission by having our SINGLE "no-penalty" resubmission used up in a mastery-based course.
I'm genuinely disappointed by how poorly this course has been handled, and it's honestly appalling that this is the standard of teaching we're expected to accept.
