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The class rep., Scott Goodwin, tells me that many of you are agitated about the notional reduction to 1.33% from 2% credit for each of the "D" small exercises. To me, from the other side of the fence, this couldn't be further from the point. My belief is that possibly in any subject but certainly in HCI you learn from doing the exercises: not from reading, or listening to me lecture, or writing the exam. I do not have good experimental evidence for their learning value, but it corresponds to the experiences I remember as important to me in developing what I know about HCI. If you did the exercises seriously and nothing else, I expect you would have learned something useful. If you read the handouts and did the exam but not the exercises, you would probably have learned nothing of value.
The management and examiners on the IT course dictate that I must use 60% of the marks on an exam, and what the form of the exam should be. They do so even though writing an exam question has nothing much to do with HCI because in an exam it is easy to be confident that an answer is all that student's work, while for practical coursework it is not.
This leaves me only 40% to allocate between the exercises. I do that to indicate their relative value to each other, and to indicate that I think they are valuable to do. But with only 40% to go round, some of the marks look very small. Nevertheless, that I believe is where your best learning may take place. There is nothing very unusual about this. The maths I learned from primary school to university always relied on doing numerous examples, and there was no nonsense about getting credit for it outside exams: that is just what learning maths involves. What is sad is if you think the only point of doing such work is to get marks, rather than to learn or understand some HCI. To a great extent we (teachers) have brought this on ourselves. Over the last 10 years there has been a marked trend in the IT course towards more and more firm deadlines, penalties, and rewards by marks. This has been good in that far more students work in a regular and orderly way now, and considerably more work of a reasonable standard is done. But it is bad because it further reduces the personal choice and responsibility of students over what they learn and do.
Your real choice as a student is whether to try to get high marks without caring whether you learn anything worthwhile, or to try to learn the most useful stuff while ignoring marks, or both: to learn what is most worthwhile while politely putting up with a marks system that is at best loosely connected with that. Occasionally past students who meet me again say how this HCI course made a deep impression on them, and even changed how they looked at things. Then I know that at least a few students really learned something. But one reason why I haven't campaigned harder for a different assessment system is that I can't imagine one that would be acceptable and yet test what matters. What matters in HCI above all is not knowing some fact, but having a different attitude: one that will make you argue with employers to try a prototype early on, to pay for user testing and to do all this several times during the design process. How could I test whether you really believed that and how hard you would fight for it? The concepts I lecture on offer one basis for belief (and for justifying it to others); the exercises offer another, perhaps more important. If you have had the experience, which I try to contrive in ex.A but cannot guarantee for each of you, of building a user interface you actually think is pretty neat and bound to please others and then see friends of yours nevertheless have trouble even though they want to be polite to you, then you really get the message that testing makes a difference. When asked, you would be able to say that you have seen the difference it makes with your own eyes.
In the end, the marks are one way I have to say I believe the exercises are important to your learning. This message is another.