School Daze

Yeah, it's been awhile. Nothing eats your leisure time like school work, immigration & tax forms, and job hunting.

School is going well so far. I'm about halfway through the semester which usually means lots of midterm exams and projects will be due soon. For some reason, that has not been the case this time. Most of my classes already had mini-exams, with two or three more scheduled in later weeks.

More professors have begun to dabble in using online learning products like WebCT, Blackboard, and Aplia, though to questionable effect. I particularly hate the odd selection of due times for online assignments. For example, my Macroeconomics class meets only once every Wednesday, but several small assignments are due throughout the week. So I have assignments due for this class on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday Nights, at 11:45pm. Why on those days and at that particular time? No reason I know of; and that's what makes it so frustrating. You may say "The prof needs time to correct the assignments so they can be returned to you on Wednesday." Well, no. The computer corrects the assignments for him. And even if it didn't, do you really think he's sitting at his computer at 11:45pm every night, waiting for us to finish our assignments? I think not. So, if you're gonna set a due time other than class time, why not make it something more meaningful like 8:00am. Then I have all night to work on it (as I like to do sometimes) and the prof would have all the results ready for him when he gets to his office in the morning.

An update for my A+ Certification: I passed the first part of my exam, Hardware, and will take the second part, OS Technologies, as soon as I've finished brushing up on my Windows 95 DOS commands. I did fairly well on the hardware part, and I expect to do even better with the OS.

There's your update. Time to get back to my school work. I think I have one of those Econ assignments due in a couple of hours...