ITT-Tech SUCKS

The Return of the Window Lickers
Another Saturday morning of time well spent.  This week for capstone was chalk full of fun, and as an added bonus if you make it to the end of this posting there is an EPIC tale which I can hopefully find the words to describe accurately. But first, ranting! 

So it's week 2 and the class consists of a lot of make believe project management focused nonsense. We had to make up silly questions to ask the teacher about the make believe RFP, which he then answered in the most generic way possible; you know, since it's all fake anyway. 

After that came the lab, and being a technical school and the final course of a technical degree we did some really technical hands on stuff that really added value to my education. LOLOLOLOL. Actually we all went to lab and then wrote a single page about the fake answers the teacher just gave us, specifically with concern to if his answers changed our plans at all. Even if they didn't you still had to print out a piece of paper that said your plans remain the same and hand that in.

Then things got REALLY stupid. 

A secondary theme to this capstone is to try and get people more comfortable with presenting things. So every week we are given a really generic topic to make a powerpoint about.  This week we had to talk about a vacation we went on once, and what made it memorable. Not only is that extremely boring, but let's also remember that the teacher is one of the worst speakers in the school, and gives no pointers or feedback on any presentation that would result in learning to present better.  You stand up, you spew, you sit down and we move on.  Helpful right? 

No real surprises here, most people suck at presenting, or have god awful choices for font size/colors. Some precious gems combine both into one magical fail filled monstrosity. And then it happen... one of the really amazing students got up there...  REALLLLLLY AMAZING. 

Let's keep in mind that this student has passed 400 level classes and is about to complete a bachelors program.  This student went to Mexico for his trip, while down there he tried to fish.  But he couldn't figure it out, the whole reeling in the lure thing was just too complicated so his parents took the fishing pole away from him.  But it gets even better... so much better. 

That night his father makes a camp fire, which fascinates our star ITT student.  "What is fire?" he asks his father. "Pick up one of those logs son" the father tells him, so he does; burning his hands terribly and screaming in pain. "Fire hurts" he says, and his family laughs at him.

The next night the students father asks him if he would like to start the campfire. The student is some what apprehensive given the events of the prior night, but he agrees. The father hands him a lighter and some paper and tells the son to be careful and don't get too close because their is lighter fluid on the wood. I think we know what happens next, but just for lolz...  

He goes right next to the fire and starts the lighter, there is an explosion of flame that burns his face and hair. 

That's how I learned to stay away from fire - ITT Student

"That is how I learned to stay away from fire" he says, and his presentation is over.  Looking around the room showed nothing but shock. This is a grown up, he can't be serious.  But he was, and he was about to have the same degree as the rest of us. 

Capstone - Round 2 - FIGHT!

Here we go again, and the horror started to pile up the first day!

First - The teacher is one of the least technical in the school, he's actually a project manager.  I've had him for multiple classes and he's terrible. His idea of lecture is reading every slide in his presentation word for word.  One potential hilarious moment to come though, I noticed he has a class dedicated to "better presentation skills." HA!

His labs also deviate quite heavily from anything technical and usually focus on what he knows, project management. So instead of learning about networks and security, you instead write multiple high level papers about the processes and policies of IT. Which is pretty much the exact opposite of what you signed up for. I don't want to write papers about IT, I want to be the guy doing it, which is why I didn't go to school for project management.

Oh and did I mention he assigns TONS of this junk? I am talking 3-5 writing assignments per class + homework + I still need to actually do the capstone project. My group printed about 200 pages of documentation the first day...

Second - Groups were picked at random. There was some make believe "real world" excuse given for this. Which in some cases is true to an extent, however there is one glaring error that I feel is totally ignored. In the real world, all the people you work with know at least enough to have gotten the job. Even the most useless employee at your job got that position by showing some degree of competency.

This is a huge difference from people in a class. Some of my classmates are down right retarded, most simply got tricked into taking computer courses because they had no idea what to do. A small few are actually interested, and you can cut that group down again if you want to look at people who are good. So how does it make sense to force me into a group with these people?  People who would be fired from any other job.

The final quarter has begun.

Have you ever signed a contract or lease and then spent the remainder of the time counting the seconds until you were free of it? That's what my final quarter at ITT feels like.  There is no sense of accomplishment, no satisfaction, and certainly no looming job offers.  I imagine it's similar to what a prisoner feels as he gets closer to his release date. No one gets out of prison with fond memories of friends made and good times shared, you just want it to end.

I talk a lot of smack about the teaching staff at ITT, so much so that some people may be reading this blog and thinking that I am bending the truth. I also firmly believe in giving people another chance, if only to watch them fail miserably again.

Let's have a test!

The Idea:
Will one of the self proclaimed best teachers at ITT accurately grade writing assignments worth 55% of my total grade?

The Setup:
I am taking environmental issues and we have a choice of writing assignment for our grades.  We can either answer all the questions at the end of each chapter, or write a summary report of the chapter in our own words.

I tried one of each and handed them both in a few weeks ago.

Behind the Scenes:
Here is where it gets fun as I dabble a bit in psychology.

Paper 1
For the first paper I chose to do all the questions, but there is a catch. I purposely didn't write the questions with the answers, thus forcing the teacher to have the questions handy himself in order to grade my answers.  Just for added spice I also completely ignored a few of the questions and made up a totally random answer, and I copy pasted one of them as the answer for another question.

Paper 2
For the second paper I did a chapter summary in my own words.  This actually proved to be more time consuming since I had to go through more of the chapter to get the gist of the sections. I turned in a summary that was about 500 words, and liberally sprinkled with filler. The question being will the teacher actually take the time to read through all of these summary paragraphs for multiple students and notice my filler?

The Result:
Paper 1 got me an 85%
Paper 2 got me a 60%

At a glance it would seem that I got "caught" half assing the second paper, and I suppose on some level that's true.  But here is the kicker! I got a 60% on the second paper purely based on it being too short.  The only feedback on the page simply states that it's impossible to give a good summary using the amount of space I did. So he didn't even read it, he just gave me some generic low grade based on the length of the paper, even though I had to learn more of the chapter to write the summary.

As further proof, look at the first paper.  You know... the one that has copy/pasted answers for multiple questions and made up responses that don't match the questions.  It is extremely obvious this teacher is not "grading" anything.  He is casually skimming papers looking for glaring errors, and handing out generic grades based on the appearance of completeness.  Per his note, I got an 85% on the paper because I didn't write the questions with the answers.

Some examples:
Question 7 - Compare and contrast anthropocentrism, biocentrism, and and ecocentrism.
Answer - The preservation ethic has less to do with change, and more to do with wanting to keep things closer to what they have been.

Question 9 - Describe Aldo Leopold's land ethic. How did Leopold define the "community" to which ethical standards should be applied.
Answer - A land ethic is a code of ethics used when you are going to make changes to the land. Tree huggers love land ethics.

Just reading it again now makes me laugh.  A land ethic is a code of ethics about land...  That's worth an 85%!  lolz.

How are students supposed to learn anything with that kind of laziness in the teaching staff? If the teachers don't even pretend to care about the work, how can you expect students to care about it?

Not only that, but ITT has been taken to court before for exactly this same issue. Schools have been accused of artificially increasing student grades with this method because it gives them larger government checks to have students with good grades.

 

*update on this!*
Just got another email from career services, this time offering jobs at UPS! Great work for an IT student... moving boxes from point A to point B.

Just a quick update today.

A friend of mine who also goes to ITT-Tech got an email today from his career specialist. At first glance it looked like a pretty typical huge email of spam.  Career specialist is of course just a fancy title for someone who does job searches on the internet, and then copies the whole thing into an email.

Want more proof?  The guy didn't even remove the Indeed branding from the email, he just sent it on. Because an IT student can't do a search at Indeed right?

He included the "sponsored" jobs with the other jobs.  So not only are you getting crappy spam jobs, you are literally getting spam too via sponsored job posting.

And now for the cream of the crop, here are some of the jobs this career services person is helping a networking student find...  Hilarious:

• Inside Sales Representative - Want to be a cashier?
• Software Tools Engineer - You do networking, you know how to code right?
• Retail Consultant - No seriously, want to be a cashier?
• In-Room Dining Server - How about wait tables?
• Babysitting Job - Watch my kids then!
• Book Cover- Back Cover Designer - So on top of networking and programming, you obviously can do design too, right? Ironically I actually can, but that's besides the point. *wink*  

I can't make this stuff up! It's just amazing. You are spending $80,000 to have some idiot spam your inbox with jobs any idiot off the street could get. What baby sitting job is going to pay enough to cover student loans that large?

But wait, who was it who sent this magical email?  None other then the same retard who I got into a war with last week. Now it all makes sense.

If you were good at finding people jobs, why do you work here?

So about a month ago I got an email from career services, they wanted me to send in my resume for a critique. Normally I would wonder what they did with the other resumes I sent them, but since this makes the 5th or 6th time I've done this, and I have never heard back from any of the others; I just sent it.

Fast forward a month to today, and me getting an email from the same idiot who asked me for my resume a month ago.


Does this say professional person who cares about finding me a job to repay the $80,000 school bill I have to anyone? Ignoring the highlighted portion for now, notice this isn't even about finding me a job.  It's about signing something that lets them off the hook for finding me a job. "So I can let leadership know you do not need assistance in finding employment."

WTF?

Quick Recap of Career Services:

• I have sent half a dozen resumes to the career services department, never heard back. 
• I have never been offered a job through career services.
• I have been spammed with copy/pasted job searches from sites like indeed/dice.
• I have been invited to "career days" that consisted mainly of security job work and staffing agencies. 

And now these idiots are trying to get out of one of the biggest selling points they spew everywhere when they are trying to get you to sign up for classes?  What happen to your 70-90% job placement rates? I am in a networking program without a networking job, how do you determine that I don't need job placement assistance?

But wait, lets not forget about that highlighted bit. "Don't make me come to your class room."  Are you retarded? I am not a child and I paid to attend the class, what planet are you on that you think you can come and remove me at your whim?

Here is my response, which I had to re-write and expand on because my original response was shove your paperwork up your ass bitch:


It's just really amazing to me, at least it was until I looked up Mr. Shario and saw that he was a jerk off political science major.  Which totally explains why he's a low level career services person at a joke technical school. But still... don't you think your time would be better spent responding to my resume email, instead of sending threats about pulling me out of class?

So yeah... get out your check books and come to ITT-Tech!