The Student Becomes The Teacher

The student becomes the teacher. I just finished all of my Java classes and received my final grade. I got an A, but I received points taken off because my final team project did not work.

Confused, I emailed him back and told him that simply wasn't possible and that I had painstakingly tested it for a week and accounted for EVERY error circumstance with exceptions. While it was a team assignment, I coded virtually all of it.

The assignment was to build a tracking program for charities. It was a multi-part project, so it started out that I had to save things to a binary file and then read them back. The final part was to switch to a database which included:

A facility to build the database
A facility to import the file
Ability to write to the database
Ability to read the database


So I built it with these exact parameters and more. I added a file and help menu, created a statusbar from scratch (Java Swing doesn't have a statusbar API), created the function to build the database, import the file, and so on.

I chose JavaDB for my database, aka Apache Derby. If you are previewing the code and running it from an IDE, you must import the external derby.jar included with the Oracle JDK. Otherwise, the program cannot use the database. Now if I create an actual compiled jar, it includes the libraries.

Come to find out, the instructor did not setup his development environment correctly and had not imported the required database jar files.

So, the student becomes the teacher. Now, did he give me the points back? Of course not.


Now to move on to C# and WPF.

 

Ah, Grasshopper. You may now have learned the most important lesson of all:

That the World is not Fair...

:major

 

Totally unprofessional and surely he must be accountable.

This seems really unfair and you should take it further as it may mean a distinction instead of an A.
Surely you have a process of appeal or review? The University my son attends has an independent appeal process where if you lose the appeal then you forfeit another 10 of your marks for appealing frivolously but if you win you get the marks you should have received. :-D

Cheers and good luck :cool

 

Well, I need him to fix my grade for him dropping points for claiming I didn't participate in online discussion too. That will put me at 99% once fixed. I dunno if its worth fighting for the half point he took.

 

Hmm 99%not a bad mark:-D
At my son's Uni 90% is an 'A' then 91% to 95% is a distinction and over 96% is a high distinction so if you were at my son's Uni your extra mark wouldn't show up on your certificate because you already have a HD (high distinction) but if you got 100% then your certificate would say honours.
Keep up the good work :highfive

 

Possibly. I know I would be embarrassed if a student showed me up like that.

I mean, my program was 100 times more complex than any other team, and I did most of it myself.

 

Yeah you don't get credit for high marks here but anything below 95% drops your GPA. 4.0 is 95+.

 

Were you in front of the class when you pointed out his error?
May be why the points were left as is.

 

Not really possible, being its an online class :-D

 

So he's just lazy. Got it.

 

More like vindictive.

 

Curious though ... please note this

if this is a team assignment why did you do most of the coding? Was the grade for you alone and not the rest of the team? I guess what I'm trying to get at, is what role(s) did each team member have? Did everyone have their own section to code?

 

Because it was an advanced Java class and I was the only one who had the real know-how to complete it.

I didn't mind, because it is an important subject for me. One team member bailed. Another never showed up. The last one besides me did some of the menu coding, and work in the prior weeks (which I ended up overwriting in the final project).

So while over the weeks I did break down the project for each member, it pretty much fell flat when half the team disappeared.

I mean, it wasn't a HUGE project, just somewhat complex. I think its about 1500 lines of code.

 

As long as you're satisfied with the final product, Prof. can just go hang.

 

LOL cause Adry is anal when it comes to things like that and he ain't gonna let any of his "team" screw up his grade :-D

just sayin'.....

 

There is that too...

 

1500 lines? That's huge compared to what I have to program in my C class in college. Our current assignment: http://people.cs.und.edu/~rmarsh/CLASS/CS230/HOMEWORK/hw7.pdf

Pretty simple compared to what you're doing, I'm expecting it only to take around 200 lines, if that.

 

1500.:eek
I think My PHP class even in the advanced class will only go a few hundred.

 

I'm with Adry here. When ever I'm put into a 'team' I tell them to get out of the way and let me work. I've never been on a team where I didn't have to be the one doing all the work.

@Adry: Fight for every single point, or half point you can get. Don't let these lazy jerk teachers get away with this kind of garbage.

 

Actually, the latest version I am working on is close to 1500 lines. I reused some of the code to make a new program that I am going to possibly sell.

I just looked and the version I turned in is a little over 800 lines after I removed all of the debugging code.

GUI creation really adds to the code length vs. console apps. Then accounting for all of the exceptions and making it dummy proof bloats the code quite a bit. This same app would have been 1/4 of the size as a console app.

I have uploaded the source code, database, and binary file to be imported as well as a self-executing jar file.

http://www.mediafire.com/?iabv1j3a442d3at

Note if you try it: You must create a database first from the file menu, and it can take up to 10 seconds to complete.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2056318/sample_pic.PNG

With hidden statusbar showing:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2056318/sample_pic2.PNG

With data stored in database:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2056318/sample_pic3.PNG

 

Oh trust me, I am :-D

I've even haggled instructors over giving me 99.5% for a grade when I feel I earned the full 100%.

 

I'll download and try your "Charity Recorder" if you promise to donate to me to verify it works LOL

 

Do you accept belly button lint as a donation? :-D