Year seriously over now
I got my grades yesterday, so now the year is finally officially over as well. Due to MASSIVE INCOMPETENCE I hadn’t received my grades for last semester yet, so I just found out those as well.
All of it is roughly as expected, with a few exceptions.
Due to shuffling with classes at first and regular indifference later on, I never ended up going to Taalbeheersing (“language control”; basically Dutch grammar and spelling), and 6 out of the 20 points were supposed to be from tests during the semester. I didn’t expect to pass, but I went to the exam anyway because I had nothing better to do.
My final grade was 13/20.
I knew my Technieken voor Datamodelering (Techniques for Data Modelling; SQL plus some theory about ERMs) grade would be high, since I’m reasonably good at SQL (or, compared to most other people in my class, absurdly good) and I actually put some effort into the assignment thing, but my final grade was 19/20, which is probably the highest grade I’ve gotten on anything since 6th grade.
This was also a first-year class (though it was called Systeemanalyse (Systems Analysis) last year, and had a lot more irrelevant wank and no SQL), so it’s particularly funny.
Then there was Netwerken, which was last semester. I went to all the classes and the labs (and even handed in most of my lab reports), and the exam went great, and much of this stuff is things I really enjoy doing (this was also the class with the cryptography things), so I expected to get maybe 16/20, if not more. Turns out I got 11/20.
It’s more than enough to pass and it’s not like I’m shooting for a magna cum laude or anything, but it’s still absurdly and incomprehensibly low.
I didn’t pass my COBOL class. That’s not unexpected (or unintentional), I just thought it bore mentioning.
Interestingly, though, I also didn’t pass my Java class last semester. I got 6/20.
This semester, despite not putting in more effort or actually being any better at Java, I got 15/20, which is the top of my class.
They’re different teachers, obviously, and the one I had this semester was much better, both as a teacher and as a dude to have a conversation with, but it’s still pretty entertaining.
I don’t mind taking another exam to make up for it; it’s trivial to do, and before the exam last semester started he told us the make-up one in early September would include actually writing code on a computer before-hand as opposed to just writing it on paper using his brain-damaged wrapper classes he wrote around part of AWT and Swing because he doesn’t understand how they actually work1.
So I had a look at those questions, since they’ve been only since December, and honestly, they just remind me of why I hated that class. For example (translated from Dutch):
A person has a name, an address (street, number, city) and a phone number. Write a class
Agendathat allows you to quickly find the address of a person given their name or phone number. There are thousands of people. In your solution you obviously won’t use arrays,Vectors, orArrayLists.
Now, we obviously aren’t expected to write our own data structure (that would be too educational much like a real college advanced), and we also can’t use a database, so basically this exercise comes down to guessing which class from the Java standard library he has in mind and then writing ten lines of code using it.
Since this is Java and this guy embodies the clueless enterprise stereotype (IIRC the only languages he sort of knows are Java and C#, and he sucks at Java), there isn’t even a real way to guess what he considers to be a reasonable use of resources (specifically, memory) or time (is five seconds long? I’d say obviously yes, but you never know).
I’m guessing he’s expecting two TreeMaps with different Comparators, but there’s no way to be sure, and it sure as fuck isn’t something I (or anyone else) would consider to be a reasonable solution to this problem.
(To compare, the guy we had this semester gave us some general principles to use every week and let us make up our own problem entirely, on the condition that our solution was a good one for it. This one just makes up crap toy problems and ham-fistedly tries to force library classes and “design patterns” where they don’t belong. And naturally, he requires UML diagrams (syntactically correct, though AFAICT he uses his own private little dialect which isn’t documented anywhere) for everything.)
Tim Minchin interlude.
And now for something completely different.
Wooh vacation.
My parents are going to my grandfather’s sea-side apartment one last time before my uncle buys it to simplify the inheritance (estimated value 525,000 € for just that one apartment, which I’d guess is about twice as much as he originally intended to pay; he already got a ridiculously good deal on the house in Tienen, though), and I think they’re taking my sister with them, so I should have a week or two of peace and quiet (and pantslessness) at least.
My mom also wants to buy a dog before one of us goes out to buy a cat, which should be interesting. I voted for a cocker spaniel (English or American, either one; it’s interesting how much their differences resemble the differences between European and American badgers, if you squint and are drunk), my dad wants a labrador (Spike was half-labrador), and my mom wants a Cavalier King Charles spaniel. Even if it doesn’t end up being a cocker spaniel, I’ll still make an effort to have it named Haskell, though.
It’ll probably be another month before we get it either way. I’d promise pictures, but I keep promising pictures of things and then not delivering. I apologise.
1 There are a lot of legitimate criticisms of AWT and Swing, and I’ve yelled most of them at this semester’s teacher at one point or another, but “it’s too hard for students in their third semester of Java to understand” isn’t one of them.



Edit: Screenshot!