11 May 01
And now, the Computer Engineering Department Rant:
Every day I feel it’s less likely that I’ll get a master’s degree. The department that seems so good as far as national rankings are concerned is really nowhere near as good as I once thought it was. Some other student (who took the same grad-level operating systems class I dropped) sent an email to the grad and faculty mailing lists with a rant on how terrible that class was for anything other than mindless memorization and regurgitation. I wish there was a safe way for me to start a conversation with anybody involved to tell them that I completely agree, but I’m sure if something like that happened, that would pretty much make any further progress towards graduating impossible.
Two teachers in the department tend to teach all the operating systems classes. One teacher “taught” me undergrad op sys and I failed. The other one taught me the same and I passed with full understanding of the material. So then I took the grad-level op sys, unfortunately with the first teacher. I did so poorly that failing was the best I could hope for. Then I dropped the class and decided to try again in the fall. Haha, Eric. Guess what? The good teacher is going on sabbattical. (No, I can’t spell that word.) So yippee, I’m screwed.
How can you graduate if you have to pass a very difficult class that will only be taught by the worst teacher in the department?