Pre-Req Scofflaws!

Perl Trainers,

In my nearly two-decades in the software training industry, teaching
classes for DEC, AT&T, Sun, HP, you name it, I've seen lots of
under-qualified students in classes, and several ways of dealing with
them, which I'll gladly share with you below.

Why do under-qualified students show up?  Some don't ever see the
pre-requisites (because they're enrolled by supervisors, etc.)
so they don't get an early chance to disqualify themselves.

Also, as indicated in previous posts, some students actually believe
that HTML (Nintendo, etc.) is a programming language, so they're too
dumb not to know they don't belong if the pre-requisites aren't clear
about which background languages are acceptable.

In fact, some vendors I've worked for had "training sales departments"
that would purposely soft-peddle their pre-reqs, despite repeated
complaints from the instructors, so as not to scare away any potential
sources of revenue.  The irony was that the "training delivery
department" would get lots of complaints after class about how the
students didn't learn anything, and some customers even withheld
payment, alleging "false advertising".

As usual, the front-line instructor in the classroom was the one
who had to try to make all this work out, and we were instructed (by
the "training delivery department", which had no influence over the
"training sales department") to do the following:

1) make all students sign a form on Day 1 saying that if they didn't
have the prerequisites, and chose to stay in the class anyway, they
were waiving any right to a refund, and

2) spend the first half-hour describing the background skills necessary
for the class, and repeatedly inviting those who felt under-qualified
to leave at the first break, with a complete refund.

Even these somewhat draconian measures wouldn't always succeed in
weeding out a certain class of Bozo, who would attend with full
knowledge that the course would be way over his head. He'd attend
because he knew that there wouldn't be any "final exam" (typically
omitted in corporate training, because these can embarrass the
non-learners and make the instructor look bad), but he'd be able to
pad his resume with the "Course Completion Certificate" handed out
on the last day.

My position is that it's best to scare people off in the initial
advertising with accurate pre-requisites, then during the registration
process make somebody from the company (boss, student, etc.) sign a
form that indicates they've read the pre-reqs.  If a student still
shows up who doesn't belong, I try to scare him off on the first day,
making it clear that I won't have time to teach the pre-req skills
during the class (I do try to help out a bit, but every moment I
spend with this type of student is stolen from the ones who deserve
to be there, so it's unethical to coddle these folks.)

Finally, I make it a point to identify the Course Evaluations submitted
by these students with "Under-Qualified" in big letters, because
they typically will deride the classroom, the course materials,
the instructor, catering, basically everything in sight, for their
miserable experience.

I learned to mark the evals this way when I did contract training for
an outfit that based a large portion of the instructor's compensation
on the student ratings, while simultaneously packing classes with
under-qualified students via watered-down pre-reqs.  Hardly fair
to the instructor, but I at least had some ammunition to back up
my requests for reconsideration by being able to show that the most
derisive evals were always from the under-qualified students.

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| Tim Maher, PhD  Consultix &   (206) 781-UNIX/8649          |
|  Pacific Software Gurus, Inc  Email: [email protected] |
|  UNIX/Linux & Perl Training   http://www.consultix-inc.com |
|Classes: 12/7 UNIX Fund; 12/13 Perl+Modules; 1/18 Int. Perl |
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