New Year’s Updates 🎄
Oh, hi! How’s your winter break been? ❄️❄️❄️
I personally went to Switzerland and enjoyed their nature, raclette, and overpriced everything.
Anyway, now I’m back with some news, as life wasn’t absolutely on hold over the past few weeks since I last posted.
So, to shed some light on what’s under the cut, the topics for today are:
Referencing strikes back Pt. 2​
I’ve spent a reasonable amount of time struggling with UoEO’s flavor for formatting references and even ended up writing a citation style ruleset to ease the task.
For that reason, I had mixed feelings when I saw this in my inbox on December 13th:
Starting in January 2025, students enrolled in Business, Criminology, Computing, Education, and Health courses will be encouraged to adopt the Cite Them Right style of Harvard referencing.
On the bright side, it’s a good thing since it’s one of the default styles included in Zotero, so I don’t have to worry anymore about my ruleset being incomplete. But having spent a whole night figuring out how to use the ruleset editor and reading CSL documentation, I feel cheated: in the end, I only used that ruleset once, and now it’s obsolete.
That said, it was a cool experience, and I’m honestly happier with the fact that I can now rely on a standardized and widely accepted ruleset rather than something that seemed to work.
The assignments and the feedback​
Another thing that happened is that I got feedback on a couple of assignments I submitted: the essay draft and the first part of the coding assignment.
For the essay draft, the feedback was positive. Now my main goal is to expand the draft into a complete essay over the next few weeks, adding all the details expected of it. Interestingly, the tutor submitted feedback multiple times, and I managed to read some of the earlier versions. They were, hmm, different. At first, I received feedback more suited for a full essay, which makes me wonder how assignments are graded.
As for the first part of the coding assignment about which I will probably tell you more later, I honestly did worse and only got 60 out of 100. For context, the task was to outline the architecture of an application I’ll later implement in part two of the assignment.
The issues, I believe, were that I focused on the wrong things, forgot it was a university assignment, and didn’t fully understand what was expected.
For example, I concentrated on high-level explanations of data structures and algorithms but didn’t sufficiently justify some design decisions. For instance, I proposed storing objects in a map with object IDs as keys for quick lookups but didn’t explain why that’s better than alternatives. As a computer science professional, I make such decisions daily without needing to justify them. However, as a student, I must explain how a map is better than, say, a list.
I also didn’t provide enough detail about the algorithms or the test plan. Honestly, I’m not sure how I could have done that and still stayed within the word count, but now I know I need to improve on this for future assignments.
There are parts of the feedback I disagree with, though. In this regard, I miss how assignments were handled in a previous program I attended: students couldn’t just submit their assignments but had to present and explain them in person. This allowed tutors to ask follow-up questions and verify students' understanding. Moreover, students could challenge the tutor’s feedback. If you were persuasive enough and presented solid arguments, it could even improve your grade.
Anyway, that’s all for today, and I’ll be back soon with more updates!