Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by runawaybottle 1815 days ago
If students are performing poorly, we terminate their contracts.

What do you mean by this exactly? You are school, right? It’s not possible you are not teaching them right? Should a person not have the right to fail the course from start to finish?
2 comments
tmoska 1814 days ago
Everyone surely has the right to fail projects & work on their improvements - that's a large part of learning. To clarify Lukas' point, we are constantly in contact with every single of our students and are making sure that Turing College is bringing value to them. In cases when students are progressing extremely slowly because of some factors, we have a process through which we inform students of our concerns and start having more 1on1s to help & support them.

The reason we are doing this is that at a certain point knowledge starts to "fade away" and even if you are in the middle of a course, you might start forgetting things you learned at the start of it. That said, self-paced learning is unfortunately not something that works for everybody. Our students get to try it out in our admissions process & demo month[1] to cancel free of charge before they commit.

[1] https://www.turingcollege.com/faq/what-is-the-demo-period-an...

link
burnished 1814 days ago
I think this is a valid line of questioning but personally I'm not sure everyone should "have the right to fail the course from start to finish" on the basis that it can be a severe drain on resources and perhaps even unfair to the person falling behind. If the work is highly collaborative then the person who fell behind becomes a burden for their peers. If that is not a concern you will still get people that either squeak through without flourishing (reducing the overall quality of your graduates), or people that realistically did not have a chance from the outset that then get denied at the finish line.

For the purpose of trying to determine what is or is not fair I don't think it matters whose fault this is (a failure of the school's pedagogy or of the student's ability to keep up) because I think allowing the failure state to continue is fundamentally unfair.

link