The tick box education system
I'm sat here, the last day, the dissertation for by undergraduate bachelors due at midnight...about 7.5hrs from now.
You'd think I'd be all excited and trying to get as much in this as I can wouldn't you? Nope, I'm sat here, no motivation, nothing keeping me going but sheer will. And no, I'm not a "typical student" leaving it until the last day, this isn't laziness, call me that and I'll give you a Gibbs head slap!
I simply don't want to add these things to my project report, they don't belong...but if I don't I'll probably lose a few marks.
My project did an investigation into the use of Bloom Filters in NoSQL databases. It focused on Cassandra's use in particular.
So I've written up this report, goes through the whole works, Bloom Filters, what they are, the whole NoSQL movement, CAP Theorem, BASE (Eventual consistency) and the whole works....
So what's the problem? Well, we're given this report "template", this expects certain things to be included. One of which is documentation on the user interface. I can kinda understand why they have it but I seriously think it's just bloat and distracts the reader from the discussion that matters. Who cares what the user interface looks like for a project like this, it's not a visualization of Bloom Filters is it?
I won't go any further or even include the other crap that are a waste of time here, I've bashed my course enough since I started it.
The point is, this whole system of everyone wanting you to just "tick" a box and move on is a loada crap! What's the point if it doesn't add any real value to the report? The things I learnt while doing all of this is almost of no importance and will have very little significance on my final mark, and therein lies the problem. The fact that the whole educational system runs on a template is idiotic at best.
The majority of people might learn things one way but if a small 5% goes above and beyond or in fact the other way, this template can't cater to those people. And then they wonder why the system spits out so many idiots. It's not their fault, they were simply thought how to tick boxes! Not how to think for themselves, some of them can't do anything but tick boxes and when they graduate they start to realise, oh shit! The real world doesn't work that way!
Sigh, I best end it there, I've got a template to go fill in...