Reminded by someone below
teachers can be pretty stupid, particularly when it comes to sticking rigidly to their marking schemes.

Picture the scene: A-level computing, by the time my mates and I took this course we were all employed designing and making websites and coding for a local not-for-profit organisation. One of our main bits of coursework for the computing A-level was to find a "client" and make a bit of software to meet their needs, and document the build and testing etc.

My "client" was my A-level physics teacher who wanted some piece of crap that would graph data and draw lines of best fit, do linear regression and that kind of boring crap. I set about making this thing in Visual Basic. Most of it was easy, the data input and all the simple bits worked a treat. I even got the thing doing the calculations for linear regression properly.

Unfortunately I had to rely on a third party bit of code to plug into my software to actually draw the graphs and do a couple of other bits and this bit just wouldn't work. This wasn't actually a problem as far as the coursework went, as long as the thing was well documented etc. it didn't actually matter if it didn't work properly (good thing for most of us).

The annoyance came here though: I got back my mark and found that I had been severely penalised for not doing enough testing. I went to my teacher and she mindlessly repeated that it said to perform at least 8 tests on the final thing. I had performed 3 and stopped there because I knew the bloody thing didn't work and that when it didn't work for the first 3 tests it certainly wouldn't work for another 5.

This teacher did put up with a fair amount though. she foolishly revealed to us that her husband was a copper which led to 2 years of truncheon and handcuff jokes.
We used to nip down to town in the break before the lessons sometimes and return with pasties and the like to munch during the lesson. She didn't mind to much until one particular lesson which sticks in my head. We'd sauntered in 10 minutes late, explaining it away with the queue at the bakery. We could tell she was a bit narked about it on that occasion but didn't say anything until my mate had finished his pasty and pulled out a box with the biggest chocolate éclair you can possibly imagine.

At this point the screaming started...
( Vipros. clever got me this far, then tricky got me in, Mon 17 Aug 2009, 11:48, 5 replies)

Ah good old A-Level computing
I finished that this year actually.

We were with the welsh board (no choice given unfortunately), which made the end exam laughably easy, because they pretty much recycled the same questions (to the same wording sometimes). 3 years of mark schemes later (all learnt to the letter, seriously we were all walking mark schemes) we were ready.

3 days to go 'till results D:
( unsey a frizzy haired fruit since, Mon 17 Aug 2009, 13:21, closed)

one of our exam papers was actually a buiness studies paper
it even said so on the front.
( Vipros. clever got me this far, then tricky got me in, Mon 17 Aug 2009, 13:37, closed)

Wow...
I'm almost lost for words with that.

Except that "Humans fear a robot uprising" is one of the many valid answers for the question: "What might the negative impact be on the factory employees if robots were to replace them".

Good old WJEC :' )
( unsey a frizzy haired fruit since, Mon 17 Aug 2009, 14:26, closed)

I hope the person who reminded you was me
I mean, my entry below vaguely fits...

Also, I did Computing A Level myself. Twice, in fact. Our teacher thought Fortran was still too new to be trusted, typed with one finger, and was infact nothing more than an untrained technician. He would waste entire lessons of my time coming up with solutions to a problem I had put to him by saying "well, what if you changed x and y? Then you could solve it like this...", completely ignoring the fact that changing x and y would have meant re-arranging the insides of a factory down the road where my client worked.

Ooh, and on the first attempt, one of the major questions in the exam was on how a digital camera worked at an electronic level. CCDs, and so on. None of this was in the syllabus. Tar and feathers were involved in the resolution of this problem.
(a gun that fires other, smaller guns full of jizz, Mon 17 Aug 2009, 15:00, closed)

you know I believe it was you
despite thinking I'd never seen your frankly quite amusing username before.
( Vipros. clever got me this far, then tricky got me in, Mon 17 Aug 2009, 15:53, closed)