| The program-wide changes that angered students back at the end of September are still having effect all over social media... I was a student and was affected by the changes. I'll clarify here for anyone that wants the details... Prior to the changes, small groups of students in every cohort was led by a TL. This TL was a student further ahead in the program, probably in part-time if they were a TL for full-time. The TL had many responsibilities. They would attend lecture with their group of students, conduct 1:1 everyday with each of their students for 15 minutes, grading their work and giving them feedback. They would lead a stand-up at the end of the day with their group, reviewing whatever was relevant, and every morning before lecture they would meet with the instructor and acted as an intermediary to the instructor, relaying important information such as how well the students were doing, what they were struggling on, etc. TLs also supposedly acted as project leaders in build weeks, but I did not get to experience that. Everyday, our assignments were graded by a TL on a 3-star scale. Our "sprint challenge" at the end of the week was also graded by the TL, which would force a student to retake the challenge if they got at least one question wrong. Fast forward to when Lambda announced they were removing TLs, adding student mentorship, self-assessment, and groups called "track teams". The school also reduced from 9 months to 6 months (probably to pump us out quicker. From what I've witnessed, the shortened curriculum has done students no favors). Most students were upset at the assembly announcing these changes, and pointed out the myriad of obvious flaws to the student mentorship program. Lambda claimed that the change was to improve "consistency" in the program, but students kept publicly speculating whether this was a financial move (Lambda admitted 3 months later that is WAS motivated by costs, after ignoring student speculation). |
Track-teams, which replaced stand-ups, were now student-led, with the "leader" position rotated every week. The groups were now made of students of different cohorts, and the prompts we had to awkwardly read over during the meeting were mostly soft-skills. Very few people enjoyed this, and because Lambda was not taking attendance, most people did not go. This negatively affected build-weeks, though, since your track team is your build team. Build-weeks were supposed to give students experience with working in groups. But because Lambda was not keeping its students accountable, I ended up working with just one other person in both build-weeks, when it should have been 4 or 5.
Now the grading was the sketchiest part about all this. Lambda had just switched to using Google Canvas. The canvas was broken. The school had obviously not either tested or fully realized it, but it should not have been deployed. Students were now submitting all assignments and sprint challenges through canvas, and the only grade we got was whether we turned it in or not... So there was a period of confusion (at least in my cohort) where we kept asking around HOW and WHEN our work would be looked at and graded... Nobody really knew, this includes staff and "student-success". Then it became obvious that nobody was looking at or grading our work. We now "self-assessed" ourselves and determined whether or not we thought we were ready for the next unit. Heck, I couldn't even get the answer bank to the sprint challenges. I asked the Data Science program director myself at the time, and he just said "stay-tuned for updates on feedback".