Switched Keys

<Posted on it-toolbox.com>

After a number of years in school in the 90's I came away discouraged with the quality of IT education. Course work in other areas (accounting, etc.) was well developed, possibly because the subject material was not subject to annual change. In IT courses, however, very often I had instructors that had little experience with the subject they were teaching. They had a degree and that qualified them, but the material always seemed to be new to them.

In some cases, the IT instructors were part-timers without a good teaching background. Many professions have continuing education requirements and I suspect IT educators also have similar obligations, but those CEUs are too often superficial. Maybe it would be more practical if IT instructors had to pass certifications to teach a certain subject.

Anyway, after a decade out of school I thought that would be different. While there is some difference, there still seems to be a disconnect. This is particularly so in the area of testing and educational validation. To put it a little more succinctly, they don't know how to test. Many of the questions on my most recent mid-terms were vague, hair-splitting, and ambiguous. I'm near the top of the class in every course so I can't complain that much about my test grades. Still the tests I've had in my IT courses don't really make a good judge of what I have learned and need to know for a job.

In one case, I missed the definition question because I used the word "type" when describing data type. I seem to remember a kid's game where you can't use one of the words in the definition, but that seems to be a bit odd in this case. Ironically, though, another of my textbooks describes data type as "the property of an attribute that identifies what TYPE of DATA can be stored in the attribute."

An interesting term in systems analysis is that of project charter. In the beginning of the book it is considered a synonym of statement of work. Later the statement of work is supposed to precede the project charter. If the IT terms have definite practical meanings, that would be okay, but it's much more important that instruction and testing cover the concepts behind the subject material.

And then there's the question about being able to manipulate a control while a program is running... I know you can manipulate a control as a response to certain events, but you can't modify a control in the IDE while the program is running in Debug mode. In two circumstances, there are two different answers.

I've whined about this idea in the past and will probably do so in the future. I suspect my dissatisfaction may have to do with a knowledge of the work environment. Most of the other students are focused on passing the tests and making the grade. I also hear students in other classes complain about the projects they have to do. That's what I would like to see more of. That's the way to learn how to DO what I'm learning from the text.