“… and that’s when I went to the fridge to get another beer.” German teacher recounting how he corrected our exams Ah, bachelor and master project reports, ah, bachelor and master’s theses, they could be so interesting … if it weren’t for the writing. Not the students writing it, but me having to read and correct the same mistakes over and over again. Hmmmm. And yeah, some problems run deeper. A misunderstanding on how to do the work. Like “I’m only halfway through the analysis, but to stay within my time schedule, I’m currently developing the concept/design, I’ll continue the analysis later.” Okay, great, go ahead, build something without knowing the constraints, that will work out well. *deep breath* But that makes it interesting. These projects and theses are the moment when students (and their advisors, well, mostly their advisors) see whether they actually did learn something. Or whether they just passed the exams without actually understanding the subject matter. And on the plus side, many do learn — a lot. And actually surprise you (although … that excellent work surprises … that’s rather depressing). To avoid at least some of the usual mistakes, I did write an annotated version of [...]
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