So I had originally planned to write an update for each week of the capstone. In my mind there were grand visions of moronic behavior worthy of writing about each week, sadly most weeks were just repeats of the prior week. Which still makes the bachelors program at ITT a joke, but doesn't make for a very interesting read.
So I skipped writing about it the rest of the quarters, and will just summarize now. Also, for the record! I got an A in the class, and to my knowledge had the highest grade in the oral exam only missing one question.
If are you just getting ready to take your ISS capstone and are super duper scared (lord knows why), I can tell you with full confidence to relax. The bulk of your time will be spent doing two things.
1. You will be doing a bull shit waste of time power point every single week. If you are still nervous about speaking to a group of people you have probably been having classes with for the better part of four years, then there is no hope for you.
In general it seemed like you got either a 100% or 0% based on either doing a powerpoint or not. If your power point sucked harder than an apple fan boy in steve jobs bedroom it didn't matter. So my advice for the power points? Screw them. Slap together whatever you can the night before, run spell check, and present it.
2. Classwork project related stuff. This too will suck up as much time as you have to put into it, and I saw lots of groups really slaving over this junk. If it isn't clear by now, the capstone for ISS has almost nothing technical to do in it, and is almost purely based on filling out paperwork and other project management type garbage. The capstone also assumes that your school is not a pile of dog crap, and has constructed a virtual network for you to reference against the project paperwork.
My school had no such network, so we were forced to literally make up answers to fill in paperwork.
My advice? Copy and paste as much as possible, and stop thinking about it so hard. Just get something on the paper and spend more of your time formatting it to look pretty. The teacher is obviously not going to actually check 6 different groups 30+ page report every week. Hand in something that gets you in the ball park and move on. That's what we did, and we got an A.
That leaves only two other things to do in capstone, but neither should take much time.
You still need to do your presentation. This is a total joke, the way the grading works out the presentation is only worth 5% of your total grade. To honestly do the amount of work my capstone required would take a team of experienced people months to accomplish, and for a lousy 5% it's just not worth it. Again, slap some nonsense together and just wing it, all those 100%'s for just standing up before will balance it out.
Which leaves the only thing that will trip up most people. The oral exam, which is worth something like 40% of your grade.
I actually really like that they did this because it shines a very bright light on just how stupid most of the students are. They all still pass of course, but it's something.
At this point you should really be able to just bull shit your way through the oral exam. If you are a natural talker then this will obviously be a bit easier, but really, you are about to graduate and most of the questions are pretty basic. My advice? Read over the questions that require real answers and know them. Some of the questions are specific enough that they require a text book style answer, know that answer. The rest, I would just straight up make up as you go. Your teacher is probably not that smart, and at the very least certainly doesn't know enough to really disprove things you say.
If a question asks what software you would use to prevent a hacker from doing something, make it up. How does this idiot know the difference? How can you be wrong when a question is that general? Oh yeah, it's an open source project called "no means no", I can't believe it's free!
And that's it, you are done with capstone, and never have to come back to this horrible school again. /claps
So I skipped writing about it the rest of the quarters, and will just summarize now. Also, for the record! I got an A in the class, and to my knowledge had the highest grade in the oral exam only missing one question.
If are you just getting ready to take your ISS capstone and are super duper scared (lord knows why), I can tell you with full confidence to relax. The bulk of your time will be spent doing two things.
1. You will be doing a bull shit waste of time power point every single week. If you are still nervous about speaking to a group of people you have probably been having classes with for the better part of four years, then there is no hope for you.
In general it seemed like you got either a 100% or 0% based on either doing a powerpoint or not. If your power point sucked harder than an apple fan boy in steve jobs bedroom it didn't matter. So my advice for the power points? Screw them. Slap together whatever you can the night before, run spell check, and present it.
2. Classwork project related stuff. This too will suck up as much time as you have to put into it, and I saw lots of groups really slaving over this junk. If it isn't clear by now, the capstone for ISS has almost nothing technical to do in it, and is almost purely based on filling out paperwork and other project management type garbage. The capstone also assumes that your school is not a pile of dog crap, and has constructed a virtual network for you to reference against the project paperwork.
My school had no such network, so we were forced to literally make up answers to fill in paperwork.
My advice? Copy and paste as much as possible, and stop thinking about it so hard. Just get something on the paper and spend more of your time formatting it to look pretty. The teacher is obviously not going to actually check 6 different groups 30+ page report every week. Hand in something that gets you in the ball park and move on. That's what we did, and we got an A.
That leaves only two other things to do in capstone, but neither should take much time.
You still need to do your presentation. This is a total joke, the way the grading works out the presentation is only worth 5% of your total grade. To honestly do the amount of work my capstone required would take a team of experienced people months to accomplish, and for a lousy 5% it's just not worth it. Again, slap some nonsense together and just wing it, all those 100%'s for just standing up before will balance it out.
Which leaves the only thing that will trip up most people. The oral exam, which is worth something like 40% of your grade.
I actually really like that they did this because it shines a very bright light on just how stupid most of the students are. They all still pass of course, but it's something.
At this point you should really be able to just bull shit your way through the oral exam. If you are a natural talker then this will obviously be a bit easier, but really, you are about to graduate and most of the questions are pretty basic. My advice? Read over the questions that require real answers and know them. Some of the questions are specific enough that they require a text book style answer, know that answer. The rest, I would just straight up make up as you go. Your teacher is probably not that smart, and at the very least certainly doesn't know enough to really disprove things you say.
If a question asks what software you would use to prevent a hacker from doing something, make it up. How does this idiot know the difference? How can you be wrong when a question is that general? Oh yeah, it's an open source project called "no means no", I can't believe it's free!
And that's it, you are done with capstone, and never have to come back to this horrible school again. /claps
