Re: Pre-Req Scofflaws!

> 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.


thought from [shudder] my time doing phone support for *NIX & VMS --
yes, i'm schitzoid.

in a  Comp. Support. Prof. Assoc. [name is fuzzy now] class i ran
across a good definition of support customer "skill level" index
that works for students also.  their four levels are summarize
to:

	unconcously   incompetent
	concsously    incompetent
	conciousy     competent
	unconciously  competent

plus my 5th:

	intentinally  incompetent

the middle two are easy enough to deal with: they know that they
don't know or know what they do.  the bottom one can be a pain 
to support and teach because they know too much.  their 1st (and
my 5th).  are the real pain.  u/i folk are the ones who think
that HTML is a "structured language"; i/i types don't want to risk
knowning 'cause then they'll have to be right when they do something
(vs. simply "not knowing").  

one fix for the u/i types is to get into someting serious in the
first hour -- especially something that requires their writing 
code ("hello world" is nice for this).  as the first few exercises
progress point out *which* of the prerequisite classes (manuals,
IQ levels...) covered the particular material.  some people can
keep up, enjoy the challange and won't bother you.  i/i types will
give up; u/i types can be shown the door after failing to complete
the required steps.  

in a C-based class this would involve a write-compile-link-debug
cycle on printf( "hello world" ) with char **argv thrown in.  in 
perl it could be printing @ARGV or croaking for no arguments.  

this also gives a decent chance to pull in folks with experience
in other languages (e.g., if C is a preq. then translate some C
into perl).    point is, that if you start with specific examples
of what they should have known it's easier for them to back out
than [often vague] listings of courses or "equivalent experience".


enjoi,

 Steven Lembark                                   2930 W. Palmer St.
                                                 Chicago, IL  60647
 [email protected]                                   800-762-1582