The Angry Newf

Well, I have been feeling that my blog has been far too positive, therefore I felt the need to do some complaining; today's topic for complaints is people who don't follow instructions - or more specifically the marker for the operating systems course that I am taking, who seems to have a particular aversion to following instructions.

One of the goals of a well designed course should be to provide feedback on the progress of students throughout the term, typically through comments on projects and assignements. Our marker seems to either be incapable or unwilling to give feedback on the material he marks, despite several requests from the instructor to provide more comments.

On top of not providing adequate feedback, he seems unwilling to read and follow other instructions. For the second deliverable, which contained the code for our basic operating system, we were told to submit our code and a readme explaining how to run the system. For this deliverable we received one comment from the marker - stating that our code would not run on the simulator and had given a particular error message; despite having instructions in the readme file (in more than one place) explaining how to invoke the simulator so that it would be configured properly and avoid this error. We had lost marks on this deliverable until we talked to our instructor and had him return it to the marker with instructions to read the README file and follow the instructions included.

Well, I just needed to rant about that a bit; need to get that off my chest and make the blog a little less positive.