A Myth Of An 'Average Software Engineer'

Final Exam by design does not include any new information. It does not introduce new concepts. Final exam covers only those topics that have been covered previously in the course and nothing else. Still, final exam is a surprise. Always. Professors discover something about students and students discover something about themselves. It is all happening very quickly within few hours.

If you walk into a room right before an exam starts, you feel a tremendous charge of energy. It feels like walking into 'an electric generator that was just hit by a lightening'.

I am a professor sitting in front of the class, watching students going through questions. Exam is three-hours long and I always feel for students. I see a woman crying on the last row, as her computer keeps rebooting. I see another chap rubbing forcefully his eyes, as it should help his thinking.

Suddenly, one fellow stands up and says that he has completed all questions. He is on a way out and I reflect, “Are you sure? After you press the ‘submit’ button, there is no way for us to reverseit”. He responds, “I prepared well to this exam. I spent many hours studying”. He walks out of the room with an air of over-confidence. I glance at his submission. It is awful! I immediately assume that the reason his score is so low, because he did not spend enough time during the exam. As he completes exam within an hour, which is a third of the allotted time. I keep hoping that other folks, who exhaust three hours, will score better.

The person, who submits exam within next few minutes, has the highest score of the whole class. He surely disproves my initial theory. It’s not only the time spent during exam. Apparently, a multitude of other factors does play into it.

Diversity among students (professional background, physical proximity) is too significant to assume a single face of a learner. This is particularly true for a body of on-line graduate students in computer science. Conclusions of the study (each learner is unique and each class is unique) are extrapolated to demystify the notion of an 'average software engineer'.