Enterprise web programming Modules ENTWA (Level 6) and APSW (Level 7)

APSW feedback 2013-2014

"Official" feedback was generally good with 10 questions getting a green traffic light, 2 amber and 2 red. The two reds were for "workload is manageable" and "assessment arrangements are fair". I think this reflects the high levels of stress that some students felt about the second coursework (see below). The two ambers were in "I enjoyed this unit" (though 68.5% of students did) and "I am satisfied with this unit" (though 65% were). I suspect these were linked to the red responses.

The comments showed the students really appreciated the practical aspects of the course, including the group work. They were overwhelmingly positive about the Java EE technologies covered. As usual, some students asked for more practical sessions, but once again there were periods of nearly every lab session (and both supervised work sessions) when I was under-utilised, so it would be difficult justifying more. A common comment was about how hard the coursework was, or suggestions that it should carry greater weight in the overall assessment of the unit. One student commented (adversely) on the relevance of the unit to their Computer and Information Security course.

There was a big issue caused by the groupings for the second coursework. This is designed to work for groups of 2-6 (1 at a pinch) and last year I allowed groups as small as 2. This year I leaned on small groups to merge with each other so that we eventually ended up with 3 groups of 6 and 1 group of 5. Some of the students were a bit resentful of this, feeling they had been forced into working with students less committed to putting in hours of effort than themselves. I thought that having a mix of strong and weak students in each group would help the weaker students. In fact, although the strong students still thrived, some of the weaker students did not. I think this caused stress to both stronger and weaker students – the stronger students believing (wrongly as it turned out) that the weaker students would drag their marks down. Next year I will not press the students into larger groups and leave them to form more organic groups of 2-3 if they want.

Jim Briggs, May 2014

Student feedback stats