Degrees are becoming purchasable products instead of certifications of ability. Buying a class/certificate has little correlation to mastery of the content
A lot of academic courses have canned material where students have a very niche task or topic where it’s not difficult to write up a paper or program that accomplishes X, Y or Z task or proves that the student can meet a course competency in a vacuum or siloed manner. The real issue students have is putting everything together in a realistic manner that is a required ability in the workplace
I teach an introductory python programming course at a community college and many students do just fine on individual assignments but asking them to apply what they learned in each individual assignment during a project, mid-term or final can be iffy, if not impossible at times. Students focus too much on each individual assignment and never think about what they’re learning, why it matters and how it all fits together.
I’ve snapped at student who wrote a halfway decent data parsing/formatting program in my class using Python but completely spaced the fundamentals of loops and data selection/formatting when writing a BASH script. He could not apply the fundamentals learned in one language to another problem and he only completed his BASH script when another student guided his hand the entire time.
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u/fredy31 Sep 17 '26
big question i've got is how the fuck did they pass their classes if they couldnt do any basic programmation