the program coordinator of our faculty spent some time with my class today and i was pleased to learn that they’re going to be testing out a new pass/fail system for labs in future terms. that’s a pretty good idea, as there’s way too much pressure to get good marks (or reliance on marks as a means to gauge how successful you are). i mean losing 0.5 of a mark on a lab really does suck, even if that’s only 0.0001% of the term. it means you’re on your way to another sub-100% term. boo hoo, cry me a river. but spending a couple of days trying to comprehend the cryptic lab manual and then writing up your lab report that doesn’t even make sense to you is really frustrating. with the current system, you feel like you deserve a 100% after you handed it in based on the hell you went thru, but you end up with a 60%. at least with the new system, your report will be just as great as the supergeeks’ who did theirs in 10 minutes. actually my second thought was that this may not be as great an idea as it sounds. usually every term the labs take up too much time, are confusing, don’t contribute to the theory you learn in lecture and aren’t practical, but in the end everyone gets close to perfect on all of them newayz and it pads their mark. i thought they meant pass/fail as in you have to have passed the labs in order to pass the course, but it turns out that if you pass the labs you will still get a full 10% or whatever. that’s good to know.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: uwaterloo.ca