1-up'ping law students
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The college I go to has this subject, "Law in IT", which is offered for students of Computer Science and Law. I daydream of working with computer forensics someday so I thought I'd give it a shot this semester.
We had about 30 students for this subject this semester, only 5 from Computer Science. Most of the lawyers-to-be are well above their 40's and are quite computer illiterate, but still, the class focused a lot more on laws and courts and cases than on technology. We learned about copyrights, patents, EULA's, contracts, the relationship between hacking, crime and ethics etc.
Our professor was really easy on the students. Our exams were all taken in a lab, and he let us pick up all the material he'd used during the classes and use them. He also let people use the internet during the exams - supposedly for googling up on anything that might be relevant for the tests, but I think a few of my classmates where exchanging answers via IM tools.
A minor WTF related to this is that since this subject does not really belong to the Computer Science course, it was not in my exam schedule. So one day I trod into the lab on the day of the exam to chat with a couple of friends who are interns there, but instead found out that I was 40 minutes late for the final exam on that subject. Seeing as some other students seemed nervous then gave me a minor chill, but I was able to finish the exam in under 20 minutes. I was also the first one to finish it, btw. It didn't seem too hard. The questions were all like "Should a company be able to have access to an employee's email account? Justify your answer by citing the relevant law or laws, and comment on it."
Just yesterday, the professor told the law students in the class they should be ashamed, since the only one to get the maximum grade was a student from Comp Sci (me). I think in general we nerds have been scoring consistently higher in this subject ever since it's been given at our college.
(I'm not a native English speaker so there may be some mistakes with the technical terms related to education. I'd appreciate some help with them if you find any.)
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It makes no sense that a college would allow students who are supposedly studying a subject to gain skills for employment, would let students use Google to find answers. In high school, exam supervisors are a lot stricter in the way they run exams, so why ease off when these students hit college and should have their study protocol (?may be the wrong word here...) downpat.
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@HannahRochelle said:
It makes no sense that a college would allow students who are supposedly studying a subject to gain skills for employment, would let students use Google to find answers.
In the real world you would use the internet and other resources to look up things you didn't understand, so doing it at Uni makes sense as well. Calling it a test is something of a misnomer, as assignment is usually used to denote a such a task, but the idea makes sense. I'm not saying that there is no place for exams, but rather that there should be a mix of assessment types.
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@HannahRochelle said:In high school, exam supervisors are a lot stricter in the way they run exams, so why ease off when these students hit college
I have taken tests which were more chaotic than that when I was doing first-year CS, but they only counted for 10% of the grade or so each. In those tests, we were allowed to wander around the room and talk to other students, but some students still managed to fail. OTOH, the exams were run sanely, but they were administered by the university centrally, not by the individual schools.
@HannahRochelle said:
...have their study protocol (?may be the wrong word here...) downpat.
I'm not sure which word you are referring to, but "protocol" makes sense but is technically wrong, and sounds like a buzzword, so "practices" or "habits" would be more natural. Down pat is correct, but is normally written as two words.
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[quote user="Renan "C#" Sousa"]So one day I trod into the lab on the day of the exam to chat with a couple of friends who are interns there, but instead found out that I was 40 minutes late for the final exam on that subject.[/quote] I have nightmares that go like that.
