Apropopos that student 'complaint' from years past stating that it was unfair of me to expect computer science students to write essays. The crux of his argument was that if he'd wanted to write essays he would have enrolled on an English degree! It seemed to me to be a rather strange complaint. Surely, I thought, students don't imagine that they'll go through the whole of their careers expecting never to need to argue their case for, say, a new project or even to never have to document, explain, justify, and defend their design decisions and implementations.

Now I may not be the best communicator in the world but I know that as a lecturer I need to be able to write and communicate reasonably effectively. I can think of few professional jobs where this wouldn't be the case. And certainly computer science is not one of those that don't need communication skills. The vast majority of graduates of a Strathclyde CS degree work in challenging, professional, well-paid jobs where the ability to communicate is of paramount importance. So I make no apologies for setting (short) essays - even in exam papers.

It might also come as a shock to some/many of my students to know that many employers use an essay as one of their main graduate selection mechanisms. Perhaps armed with this knowledge such students may take the challenge of becoming a better communicator more seriously. I have read, and marked, many final year projects in which the standard of written communication ranges from poor to abysmal - and this from MIPS [Members of the Indigenous Population of Scotland]. Interestingly enough it is often the case that overseas students [MFLOPS - Members of the Foreign Language-speaking Overseas Population of Students] have a better grasp of written English and end up writing much better reports. Which just goes to show that MIPS can be a Meaningless Indicator of the Performance of Students - a bit like exams really ;-)

Perhaps I am jaundiced but it often comes as a surprise to me to find out that some of the webloggers I most admire are, in fact, students. Wes Felter - http://wmf.editthispage.com/ - and David Anderson - http://www.uidesign.net/ and http://www.netherby.net/blog/ - for example. Incidentally, David is an old student of mine. Now, no doubt that there are many of my current students that maintain their own websites. I guess I should now mention Gareth McNicol's notable for the fact that it's the official photo album of the last Gunk Dunc. So I'd be pleased to receive pointers to student sites as I may very well now be doing the Majority of the Indignant and Pissed-off Students a disservice! URLs will tell. But remember that flash graphics, fancy fonts, frames, and animated GIFs are things That Don't Impress Me Much.

Actually, I am probably being rather unfair and contentious. I am invariably pleasantly surprised by the quality of many of the web pages that have been put together in response to my main assignment in second semester - the study of some aspect of CAD and the development of web pages to communicate this. http://friday.editthispage.com is a case in point. Many of the student submissions on that site are first-rate. The same is true of web pages put together in 1997-98 and 1998-99 [and that, alas, have suffered from a major case of link rot in that time hence the use of an editthispage.com website for the 1999-2000 assignment.]

Well Maybe I Pissed-off the Students with this acrony^H^H^Himonious discussion but I hope they take it in the spirit it was intended.

Comments welcome - especially from my current cohort of CAD students. [Cross-posted to the strath.cs.ugrad.cad newsgroup to facilitate discussion there too.] Suggestions for the next CAD-webpage assignment are most welcome too.

Duncan