failure or not... im still worried worse than ever before...

LegacyUser

i wrote this on thursday, but i couldnt post it for some reason. Now im in from a long night of drowning sorrows away, i have the courage to try again...

Today i handed in an end of year project which has takin up all my time in the last 4 months. I even gave up weekends for it. Its my end of college presentation... kind of a theseus...

The project was far beyond the prerequsites and was without a doubt the best in my year out of 100 or so students. I thought i was Garenteed at least 90% for it. It did loads of extras - and covered everything that was needed in extrem detail. This would be something i could sell and make loads of money off of if i got it in the right market.

I left one button... ONE button without code of my program which wasnt even on the prerequsite sheet. it was a button that was added just to reset a value which wasnt even relivant to the program. Infact, if i deleted the button it wouldnt matter.

I presented it infront of 2 lectureres, 1 of them had something against me becasue i didnt attend his lectures frankly because he knows i can do what he lectures better than he can and im 2/5th his age.

Everything in the presentation was great - i mind boggled the lecturers with it, they didnt have a clue how i managed to make the program do so much, and the one that doenst know me was really impressed. When it got to that one button.. the other lecturer asked me why it didnt work.

lecturer : em, whats that button for
me : its just for doing this lalalla

as i went to push the button i realised i left the code out from it. So...

me : Actually i just realised last night when i was checking over that and about to fix it i came across a bug which i had to fix and i forgot to come back to it.
lecturer : well, thats your own tough (stands up) you had 16 weeks for this project and its your own fault its not working. *walks to the door*

the other lecturer is mind boggled and says 'is that it?' and the other one says 'yep' and leaves the room.

I dont know what the story is. my presentation started at 2pm and was over at 2:15. When they left i sat staring at the screen of the computer i was at. When i looked at my watch it was 3:30.

I think i failed becasue of that one line. Im devistated. I put so much work into that and i think i got absolutly nothing for it as a reult of one button.

All my work.. for what feels like nothing. i feel so shit and i wont be able to repeat the year because im in debt 3000 for fees as it is

What can i do?

Kappar

That's absolutely unacceptable for him to do that to you. What college do you go to? Does your college have any appeals procedure? I am sure it does.

Get in contact with your students' union they may be able to help you out insofar as advice goes.

If the worse comes to worse maybe even think about getting a solicitor.

vorbis

your college would probably use external examiners for final year projects. (mine says it does) Hopefully, they would know if the mark is too low. Its still absolutely ****ty what the lecturer did. I would be ready to deck the guy in that situation. If the mark you get is too low in your opinion then appeal it. If the projects as good as you say, then it should get its proper mark on appeal.

MojoMaker

Originally posted by insertnamehere
1 of them had something against me becasue i didnt attend his lectures frankly because he knows i can do what he lectures better than he can and im 2/5th his age.

There's your problem. Without wishing to cue the dramatic music, perhaps you might be good enough to reveal all of the story (not just the bits that make you look like a victim) and use a tad less embellishment in order to tee up the boards audience on your side. Then you might get some practical & real advice. This board is not about indulging sympathy seekers. Start again and include all relevant details.

vorbis

In fairness mojomaker, that shouldn't impact on the project. Its the lecturer's fault if he is unable to mark a project fairly. Assessment of his own course should remain separate to a final year project. I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that I've skipped lectures sometimes in material that I knew reasonably enough already. The fact remains that if as insertnamehere said, he left his presentation over that one mistake, then he is completely out of line.

Hecate

Any project demos I've ever done, and I've had more than my fair share of them, if some small feature doesnt work as expected the examiners will go 'fair enough, these things happen' and you move onto the next thing. If your supervisor knows you've been putting the work in during the course of project you'll get a decent enough grade, thats what counts in the end not the project demonstration. It's also important to put together an impressive manual, I've seen people get project prizes for software that doesnt fully work simply because they had a top notch manual to go with it.

I've found that bugs never ever reveal themselves until the worst possible time, which is usually the demo

Red Alert

That sucks, and such a person shouldn't be considered fit to mark projects.

my sympathies are with you, we have one lecturer in one of the Engineering departments who takes great pleasure in docking a disproportionate number of marks for very minor things, eg. using the common abbreviation "sec" for seconds, and not "s" (the SI unit). he detests me for some reason, known probably only to himself.

such people, intelligent as they undoubtedly are should not be let conduct themselves in this fashion.

tk123

I'm with the others on this - we were always told that we would be marked for what we had put into the project - even if the code didnt work excatly right - you can put a section in ur manual called "future work" or sumting like that and say what you wud do to improve the code or how u wud have done sumting if u had more time...Our presentations were only worth sumting like 10% of the overall grade i tink....On the other hand thou and I dont want to p**s any1 of BUT i can see where MojoMaker is coming from too - i did a degree in prog too and theres nuthing worse than them peeps in the class who think they know it all and do all this extra crap for no marks - now i'm not slaggin u off insertname but u pretty much said u were better than the rest of ur class and ur lecturers - if ur giving off that vibe in college then maybe thats why the lecture was like that - why put extra stuff in and not even have it working...at the end of the day thou it doesnt matter as long as u covered what was needed and thats working and you have it documented u'll be fine..get the button working and then the external guys won't know the diff....Also and the rest of you guys can verify this - doesn't the college own the code in the projects you submit so you couldn't actually make money off it?? :mad: jammy!
Give us a clue abt the college too!!!

Lump

Nice spelling.


John

tk123

thnx i cnt spel - u might hav noticed!

uberwolf

on topic. They can't fail you for that. The other lecturer clearly thought something was a miss. You must have exams coming up as well so you don't need this to worry about. If you are concerned there are two people worth approaching, possibly 3.

Your year head/project coordinator. Explain your concerns and be a little more honest re: the reasons for aggro between the lecturer and yourself - but in the end of the day it would be him who was being unprofessional not you.

Student advisor/chaplain - someone independent to record your complaint so you have a witness for after the results - prevents you looking like sour grapes after the event.

The 'friendly' lecturer - ask him what he thought, not of the presentation more the reaction, explain your concern. He may not be able to discuss it with you for marking reasons. In our place our supervisor and our moderator have v.different rules re: the level of interaction with the student in question.

It would surprise me if this had an impact on your results - I find it hard to believe that a lecturer would jeopardise his academic career because he thinks you're a prick - it's not worth it.

Red Alert

yeah but it really depends on the supervising examiner, ie usually the head of department. regardless of marking concerns, you also have a case to make that you received quite rude and humiliating behaviour from an academic, whether or not you went to his lectures is a non-issue. Nobody has the right to disparage or demean the very hard work you obviously put in to this project, and i don't think such an outburst from somebody whose supposed to foster your interest in the subject is acceptable at all.

Auburn

Surely you are not graded solely on a demo? Do they look at your code too and your report? If so, I wouldn't worry about it too much.

I recently did a final year project myself in Java and just before I handed in my report, my supervisor asked me to explain what a try and catch statement was. This is the basics of Java. :rolleyes: Also, at my demo I might as well have run a Flash file, he hadn't a clue what was happening.

At the end of the day, supervisors often qualified from college years ago and will be boggled by stuff that they don't understand. This doesn't matter. As long as you have documented everything you did and have justified your reasons for doing things that way, you will be fine.

There is no way that one button will lose you marks. It doesn't change the fact that you achieved all of your prerequisites.

What you could do is go to the project coordinator of your college and explain that you are not satisfied that you were given a fair chance to demo your project. Explain what happened and see what they say.