Good Students Cost Less

Yesterday, I've just finished my marking job for this term at BCIT. Whenever I mark, I keep thinking that current tuition structure at any institution is somewhat unfair to the students who are kicking ass, thus not creating much headaches of instructors and school.

Okay, here is the story. As a computer programming assignment marker, we do certain automated testing in which we collect outputs and errors from students' programs and compare the results to the "answer keys." So if a student does an excellent job on perfectly conforming to the requirements, this automated test can be done in 2 seconds. Then going through his/her code to mark on his coding style or class design quality is the last part. Very painless, thus "priceless"(as not costing much).

On the other hand, sloppy students' programs generate wrong results, if not crash, so I have to actually do more manual testing to find out what the problems are: without doing it, I cannot give them partial marks. Then coding style and class design comes after too. So it takes minutes, or sometimes about 30 minutes.

In short, marking sloppy students' assignments takes 10+ times more time than doing kicking-ass students'. And who pays the marker? Directly school does it, but indirectly it's from every student's pocket. (and government, but very little under Liberal government in power) And I'm not aware of any institution which charges sloppy students more and ass-kickers less. So by paying same amount money, hardworking students are actually overcharged, or in nice words, they are paying for those students who need more attention. How nice of them?

Yes there's some kind of scholarship that pays money back to excellent students, but seriously only less than 1% of ass-kickers get the scholarship and the amount is way less than what they initially paid for. Also there are more other bullshits to get scholarship, so at the end of day, students with needs take more scholarship than simple ass-kickers.

The problem does not end here. Most schools also offer free tutors when requested by students, and how much do those students pay for it? None, Nada, Zero. Then do tutors work for free? No. School pays them again. And where do those money come from? Everyone's pocket. (and government, but still very little because the political party in power did not change while I'm writing this post.)

Nonetheless, It's always fun to watch that certain dog-fucker students like to blame kick-ass students on something stupid, while those generous people are giving out their pocket money for the dog fuckers.

Sidenote: So where did I belong to? Good students or bad students? I belong to both groups. I did belong to good students group in grade 1~2, 10~12 and computing school, and belong to dog fuckers in grade 3~9 and lawschool.