From dajhorn@maddison.math.uwaterloo.ca Wed Apr 3 07:33:41 2002 Newsgroups: uw.cs.ugrad Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 03:05:11 -0500 From: Darik Rusty Laroo Horn Subject: "excessive collaboration" debunked [was: opinions on CS 370] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII "Excessive collaboration" was a topic rolled in with cheating somewhere on this thread. I wanted to address the "excessive collaboration" problem. I am worried that it may become the latest fashionable tool with which to screw Joe Student. This type of 'cheating' is not a problem. It is a survival mechanism. It is part of the math faculty undergraduate culture. Let me declare my bias: First, I'm a dumb guy among smart people. You are smarter than me. Please don't rub it in. Second, I know people that have been unfairly screwed by the school for alleged cheating. Personally, I am clean. I always wash my hands after using the MC. This is only going to make sense as an anecdote... I knew CS undergraduate students when I was still in highschool, so I knew the truth about Waterloo. My expectations about the workload, the course content, and how much the 'Loo would generally suck were accurate. ... but I was a spaztic little masochist so I came anyways. I was fully expecting to crash and burn in my first year. I was scared. Frosh, for me, was like parachuting into enemy territory behind the front lines. Other frosh saw excitement, opportunity, and French women. I saw pillboxes, mines, and people that didn't speak the national language disguised as TAs. My study group operated very much like a platoon. We knew that we were just cannon fodder for the precious Descartes Fellows. We knew that we were just filling seats so that the academics would get their funding from the government. We knew that we had to be ready when the artillery came down and the red ink started flowing. We were small town boys trying to be men in a man's army. It was tough. None of us bought a BMW with a credit card when we got here. You see, in our day, WinCenter users weren't allowed to enlist. We scheduled and followed strict daily study sessions. We rehashed lectures. We drilled questions. If somebody didn't look like they were going to finish an assignment, dammit, we beat that soldier hard with a cluestick. Everybody submitted an assignment. Always. Yeah, some pinko stateside bureaucrat might call that "cheating". The men and indeterminates fighting in the trenches would disagree. We had to be self-reliant in the face of shitty teaching. Shitty, shitty teaching. Hence, "excessive collaboration". If you are short of brilliant, then doing Waterloo by yourself is suicide. Half of us did survive that first year. I never would have gotten through it by myself. The team was, and still is, integral to my survival. Oh, man... I'm getting all worked up and emotional about this. I'll be okay, but I've got to tell the story. Man, I'm gonna tell the story for Mark-2 and the boys. Do you remember them? Right now, they might be in an Arts POW camp, or worse. Maybe even employed. As we march towards our degree, we have little time to appreciate the "French architecture" because most of it is just bombed-out abstraction. At some place, at some time, it may have been beautiful, but we don't have the extra capacity, here and now, to appreciate it. When somebody suggests that the program should be softened, the alumni are resentful because they feel cheated. You don't graduate with a co-op BMath and step into the world with wide eye and light foot to proclaim "Good gosh! Waterloo enriched my life and made me a better person!" No, it's more like "Holy shit! I've got the red ass!" Waterloo is a meat grinder. The primary distinguishing feature of UW is that it is very tough to get that honors BMath degree. Nothing more. If you make it easier to get that degree, then you will destroy that one thing which lets the alumnus believe that five years of their life and a good chunk of their soul was not wasted. Please, make it hurt so good. The school does not create better graduates -- the strongest students merely survive the school. For the enlisted student, Waterloo is a just a five year military campaign. Past that, you're just another mercenary, albeit a battle-hardened veteran. I am tired. I am bored. I haven't had good sex in a long time. I just want to fight the good fight, and then go home. []