Working as a consultant for Strathmore University's faculty of information technology I was tasked with examining diploma students' programming projects. We had a pretty standard marking scheme; check whether the program can interact with a database - add, update, and delete records from the database; check if the program validates user input - does it allow you to enter text in a field which should only have numbers; etc. For a student to pass, technically all they required to do was ensure they met these criteria. Despite this many students were marked down for petty errors which had little to do with the functionality of the program . Some of my fellow examiners took a perverse pleasure in 'crashing' the examinees software and reducing them into tears , even when these examinees were their students who they had been in charge of for over three months. "This is not working, that is not running, it doesn't function" . They complained and complained, cras...
Thoughts from a Kenyan entrepreneur passionate about startups.