Google's Eric Schmidt criticises education in the UK

Has IT education completely gone down the shitter in this country since I was at school in 2004?

Dutch Lesbian

@ Whale. I think its another postcode lottery.

^^ If I'd spent the two years on the toilet, it'd have been just as productive as my IT GCSE... actually, no, my Welsh one was worse. *

Lol

@Hopey, I don't think postcode lottery has anything to do with it.

Dutch Lesbian

@pagad I think I remember that marking criteria. I did my GCSE's 2 years ago so I'm assuming that it was the same system and I don't think that helped me =/ Not that it is there to help me of course

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who found my time in IT completely unproductive. The size of the class probably didn't help matters too much. The teachers knew their stuff but it's just difficult for some of them to moderate what was going on at times due to how big the class was.

edited 27th Aug '11 3:11:41 PM by PiccoloNo92

I did my GCSE's this year (obviously) and the system used is the same as has been mentioned here, basically. You get marks not for the quality of your work, but for just doing prerequisite things which are supposed to be indicative of good quality.

I had a class of around thirty, and it was definitely too much. Because it wasn't compulsory, you had the better students (e.g. myself) lumped in with the poor ones. This led to the better students have poorer grades then they otherwise would.

Well when I did it, IT was mandatory (well short course) and a class of about 20-25 was full of students who couldn't care less about the subject, me included. Not the best work environment. I got most of my work done after school when I was kept behind for coursework club. There were significantly less students and it was a much better, more productive work environment.

A Level would seem to be much better for IT as the classes are smaller and the only people doing it were those who chose to, but from my observations A Level IT classes were as lazy as GCSE. But then again they were mainly people who weren't very interested in school work anyway so that was probably the main thing. IT just seems stuck down a rut at my old school which is a shame. My mate who went to a different college for A Level really enjoyed his computing course so I'm guessing my school just doesn't excel at IT.

Short Course was compulsory with me whilst the full course was optional. The school has now dropped it altogether as a compulsory course along with French I believe

edited 27th Aug '11 3:43:23 PM by PiccoloNo92

Did you people do IT as an option at GCSE?

Dutch Lesbian

@ whale: I started my GCSEs in September 2004. We had a decent amount of IT classes while it was a subject the school required us to take (that is, at KS3 level), but at GCSE level we got to choose what subjects we took, and IT was no longer required.

@ Erock: It's called maths cause in this country we have to do more than one sum.

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I think the situation about IT in schools does depend on where you live. i.e. a postcode lottery.

Because I did compulsory IT (long course - 5 modules), and some people I know who go to comp schools did compulsory IT. Whether they passed was a different matter all together.

I think current school IT is beside the point really. I'm old enough to have had a couple of years learning on the old BBC Micro. I'm also lucky enough to have had a private education which included IT before GCSE and threw in some BASIC coding.

And hereKs the thing: some of what I learnt was a relic of the era when Britain was the largest international producer of computers and two men and cannibalised components from a Speccy were a video games company; some of what I learnt was of the era of bored paper company employees in Slough messing with the font on the report they had to E-mail to head office.

In 2004, facebook was invented, right? And Tvtropes was foundedM But even though I was first put in front of a computer to learn code in 1995, I still have no idea how to do either.

And I work in bloody computer science!

I began my GCSE's in 2009, and IT was not compulsory and a chosen subject. I believe our school couldn't squeeze any more short courses in, what with R.E., P.E. and Welsh.

And A-Level probably will be better, as most subjects tend to be. Harder syllabus, stronger students... of course, I won't be taking IT as an A-Level, but...

Even if he gets his way, something tells me the classes won't be very good: I(an American) took two years of Computer Science in high school, which would be best described as stringing some classes from the Java standard library(mind this was Pre-AP/AP stuff, with the potential for college credit) that's left me with no idea how to code anything useful(I've puzzled out bits here and there, but I think that easy A's costing me a lot in that area). Heck, the teacher for one of them*

even advised us to use two classes for a sudoku implementation - one for the rule and one for the eighty-one byte array known as the board. My German classes were better and I had next to no exposure to the past tense until German III(my first teacher*

^{yet another school}

was great and taught a bit ahead) because my German II teacher Just. THAT. BAD*

^{Mit zwei punkte!}

. On the other hand, the schools all offered a course in Office, but it was pretty clearly labled as such(I forget the exact name - might have been "business" something-or-other).

TLDR: Be Careful What You Wish For - you just might get a crappy facsimilie thereof.

edited 28th Aug '11 9:37:52 PM by 20LogRoot10

Yeah, unwritten rule number one: follow all the unwritten procedures. - Camacan

I did Standard Grade (age 13-14) Computing in 1993-4, and half of that was programming, using BBC BASIC. The other half was using office applications on Apple Macs (Classics, I think). I skipped Higher computing, and did an intro programming class in first year at uni, programming in Java.

I'm not sure how much I actually learned in Standard Grade computing, other than simply spending three or four hours a week simply using a computer - that was probably helpful in itself.