Born prematurely, dead on arrival

Sometimes, I really hope I can stop complaining about my degree course but with the regular disruptions in our promised "world-class education experience", my blog has been filled with bad one experience after another.

Our 3rd trimester started just after a week's break from the trimester 2's examinations. All seems well, except for one major problem with subject, ICT306 Software Architecture. The first half of the first lesson is the typical get-a-feel session ripped right off the study guide as expected. However, when the second half of the first lesson resumed after the break, things started to make a turn for the worse.

The lecturer for the subject is Malar, and she didn't prepare the slides before coming to class. She tried to access the Murdoch's website to retrieve the slides but the APMI Kaplan's Wifi connection did not cooperate with the PC in the classroom. That was strange as we were not having any problems with the Wifi connection on the day. We tried logging into Murdoch's website on our laptops but the material was not available yet for all the subjects.

This is strange as the other 2 subjects that we had went through earlier in the week were instructed with lecture slides despite that they were not available on Murdoch's website. I can only conclude that the local lecturers involved were given the slides before hand, with the exception of Malar.

The moment she started using the marker to teach us the basics of programming in Java, I knew this is going to be a total waste of time. She went through extremely basic stuff that should have been taught to a layman rather than IT graduates who had just undergo 2 trimesters of intense C and C++ programming.

I was expecting a lesson structure with a description of software architecture, not a basic lesson in programming using Java ! It is suppose to be hard, but instead, it was so easy that it actually felt ridiculous. Towards the end of the day, it dawn on me that Malar actually had nothing to teach us, and she was probably wasting our time by filling in with semi-related nonsense. So in the end, I felt that I had just wasted a Sunday morning learning about things that shouldn't even be taught to us. If I knew things were to turn out this way, I would have rather hug my pillow and pig it out at home. What a waste of time !

The next lesson was 2 days after on Tuesday. Things didn't improved. Malar still didn't have any slides and she went on wasting our time on basic programming stuff. I gave up listening to her nonsense and spent the whole night surfing the internet. I didn't expect to learn what is a variable or how to return result from methods, I was expecting to learn the difference between C/C++ and Java. She could have just tell us the difference and get it over with.

She couldn't get the Java SDK and a Java code editor installed on the PC in the classroom due to the lack of administrator rights. Instead of accepting our offer to loan her one of our personal laptop with the properly installed software, she spurred our offer and proceeded to code in notepad, with the compulsory syntax errors as part of the education package. This is needless and a waste of our time.

Then Malar stunned me with her explanation of objects in Java. For the Java coders out there, the code snippet below should be familiar. She was using a similar example for her explanation.

//Defining class Something
class Something
{
//A string named as variable1
String variable1;

//assign a value to variable1
variable1="Hello";
}

//creating a variable with type object, with a reference to
//a new instance of the Something object
Something object1=new Something();
Something object2=new Something();

//access the content of the objects
System.out.println(object1.variable1);
System.out.println(object2.variable1);

Instead of explaining the above statement correctly as I have commented above, she explained a piece of code without the use of the 2 key terms, object and instance! It didn't make any sense at all! My NYP lecturer back in my poly days drilled us until we understood what object and instance means, and without understanding the two key terms, it is impossible to learn what is Java all about.

Then she went on to describe wrongly how multiple instances of the object stores their variables separately and are accessible separately. The correct way to explain it is that each instance of the object has it's own memory space to store it's own variables inside it but guess what? She told the class that the Java is able to do this akin to an array in C! That's absurd! And of course, she explained the whole thing without the use of the key terms, object and instance.

Disgusted, I switched off for the remaining of the lesson, spending time to rip episodes of Bleach off Youtube instead. Not only the lesson had no lesson structure due to the lack of lecture slides, whatever she was doing was so basic that it could have been done in 30 minutes tops. Indeed, she ran out of things to crap about and class was terminated 30 minutes earlier.

The more I think about it, the angrier I was. I had this feeling that the 2 lessons were done without any lecture materials at all, and thus were conjured out of the air just to fill in the first 2 lessons until the lecture material are ready. I have learn nothing new at all, and thus the lesson is a complete waste of time. Later in the night, I went to Murdoch's website and found that the course material was now available.

My suspicion was confirmed when I went through lecture topic 1 and 2. The lecture slides and the lessons that we had went through were completely different. The lecture slides had much more than what was taught in the first 2 lessons. There wasn't any software architecture to be found, just plain old Java programming. In short, the course material was not ready and yet lessons was started without informing us about the problem! BIS1 are short changed yet again! Such dishonesty must not be tolerated!

I will be rallying for support from my fellow BIS1 course mates to confront APMI Kaplan on the matter. Each lesson cost $200 on average and I am not going to let them get away with wasting 2 of my lessons on rubbish. That's $400 !!! This is crucial as if there is no makeup lessons, we have to squeeze the actual course material into the remaining lessons, which is terribly unfair to us. If we factor in the amount we spent needlessly on transportation and food because of the useless lessons, APMI Kaplan had done a good job in wasting our time and money.

Screw it, just when we are just about to get over the examination schedule fiasco of trimester 2, another cock-up occurred right away to mess up everything. This promise of "world-class education experience" is anything but the opposite.

Oh by the way, we were notified today that our next week's classes were all relocated to YMCA instead of APMI Kaplan campus. It appears that APMI Kaplan didn't assign our classrooms before our lesson started. Perhaps we were just an after-thought all along. And if my future-telling skills do not fail me, the lessons at YMCA will be done without providing us with sufficient power points for our laptops and internet access. Over-sight and failure to learn from past mistakes is part of their culture.

Round 3 begins ...