Post #2559481
2026-05-14 12:50 UTC
Replies (26)
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@silhouette@dumbfuckingweb.site 2026-05-14 12:55
@danirabbit@mastodon.online I've had the discussion so many times that grades are nothing but a snapshot of your current knowledge of often very specific points at the point in time of taking the exam. Luckily, knowledge isn't static and you are allowed to get better, learn, adapt and even break with convention at times. Our current way of imparting and testing for knowledge is deeply flawed in my opinion.
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@nikhil@social.dezinezync.com 2026-05-14 12:56
@danirabbit@mastodon.online 1. I don’t believe this 2. I don’t see why you would lie about this 3. More young women need to hear this! As a co-organiser of @swiftpune@mastodon.social I recently had a chance to meet under-grad students, and while most were highly motivated, some were extremely demoralised because of past grades. Thank you for sharing this! Mind if I use a picture of your post in my slides with credit?
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@obot50549535@left-bank.net 2026-05-14 13:51
@danirabbit@mastodon.online Yeah, my college didn't even teach Linux -- their lame excuse was that Linus Torvalds was only 6 years old.
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@geraldew@fosstodon.org 2026-05-14 13:53
@danirabbit@mastodon.online In 1986 I failed my one programming unit at university. I'd already been programming for a few years by then and have continued programming all through my subsequent IT support and data analysis career. I know the value of the programs I write because I use them myself every day. That failure, and of university in general, mainly taught me that passing courses is about conformity, not knowledge, skill, understanding or creativity.
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@IncHulk@mastodon.green 2026-05-14 13:55
@danirabbit@mastodon.online True! At university/college, I tended to partake in drinking beer and going to parties, which mistakenly took priority at inappropriate times. So I also had some bad marks for things where now I am paid as a leading consultant.
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@eruonna@chaosfem.tw 2026-05-14 14:19
@danirabbit@mastodon.online I got good grades, which is how I know I'm not good at anything
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@maj@cosocial.ca 2026-05-14 14:49
@danirabbit@mastodon.online Two classes I didn't do well in were Linguistics 101 and Intro to the Web (granted, this was circa 1996) I like to think I lived the rest of my life in defiance (BA in Linguistics, MLIS focusing on IA for web).
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@ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org 2026-05-14 14:52
@danirabbit@mastodon.online My first programming class (BASIC, in middle school!), the teacher told me "you aren't cut for programming, you should do something else", and yet I have spent a good chunk of my life writing software.
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@7666@comp.lain.la 2026-05-14 15:05
@danirabbit@mastodon.online nobody ever asked me for my grades in a job interview either, it was all bullshit minmaxing to feel better than your peers. without distinct rewards and advantages granted to performing, you just need to pass really
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@electron_wizard@fosstodon.org 2026-05-14 15:08
@danirabbit@mastodon.online D, more like Deliberately Excellent! At Uni for the lowest grade E we just say "Vier gewinnt" (four wins, aka. the German name for Connect Four; 4 is the lowest passable grade you can get) or "E for Excellent".
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@hacknorris@mstdn.social 2026-05-14 15:19
@danirabbit@mastodon.online you know it's exactly same at me?
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@rskurat@mastodon.social 2026-05-14 15:47
@danirabbit@mastodon.online you weren't good at it in the particular way they wanted you to be good at it. I come out of an experimental-science background and the tunnel vision of CS/EE academics is comical to us. If we just dismissed unexpected outcomes and always always always insisted on using the same methods we wouldn't discover anything.
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@interpipes@thx.gg 2026-05-14 15:56
@danirabbit@mastodon.online my (UK) sixth form did "Information Systems" at A-level instead of actual proper IT and I got a D in that mainly because I could not stretch a 20 point answer out of exam questions like "explain how you add up a column of cells in excel".
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@jenesuispasgoth@pouet.chapril.org 2026-05-14 16:18
@danirabbit@mastodon.online during my 2nd year of Master's, I had 5.5/20 (so… a D or E if we were in a 100-point scale?) in parallel architectures and programming. Contrary to Oz in Buffy, I don't test well. Anyway, My PhD was about performance measurement and optimization for nascent multicore architectures. 😁 You're 100% right, passion/dedication trumps rigid institutional structures (that being said, I *am* a professor who partially enforce them…).
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@dolanor@hachyderm.io 2026-05-14 16:39
@danirabbit@mastodon.online I don't remember the grade I had in Linux. But the lesson was so terrible I thought it was the worst attempt of OS possible. It was not entirely the teacher's fault, more of the pedagogic team that totally failed their teachers and students. Anyway, 1 year later, I got an absolutely passionate teacher in Linux. In 1 week, I was hooked. Since then, I discovered so many wonderful, quirky, useful, funny projects with open source. People are amazing.
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@CaymanPilot@mastodon.social 2026-05-14 16:55
@danirabbit@mastodon.online Let's not forget that it's highly probable that the person who gave you a D should get an F for not teaching you well enough to give you an A
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@gettie@fedi.catto.garden 2026-05-14 16:58
@danirabbit@mastodon.online i had to drop out from my computer engineering degree a few years ago. since then i have got into hosting online services, just for fun. as for if i'm good at it, the people who rely on these services can tell. :neocat_floof__w_:
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@HunterZ@mastodon.sdf.org 2026-05-14 16:58
@danirabbit@mastodon.online strongly agree. Got a mediocre grade in electromagnetic physics, which made me angry because my dad was an electrical engineer, and I knew I'd been exposed enough to pick up that stuff. Took an EE intro course and aced it, which made me realize that my ability to learn was affected by teaching methods. I also separately learned that academia is its own entire bubble, and most of us are just passing through with a different end goal in mind, which can cause weird frictions.
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@VANTABlack2000@mastodon.gamedev.place 2026-05-14 17:06
@danirabbit@mastodon.online The more I experience things the more I dislike formal education. IMO formal education DOES NOT make someone smart. I have seen some really dumb people (they claimed they never verified tbh) that has a Master's yet they act like they are not smart in the slightest.
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@gbargoud@masto.nyc 2026-05-14 17:13
@danirabbit@mastodon.online If you have a copy of your report card from that year you should definitely get it framed
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@crankylinuxuser@infosec.exchange 2026-05-14 17:34
@danirabbit@mastodon.online Yep, im going through a intro to databases and data class now. Ive administered Oracle, MSSQL, AWS RDS, postgres, MySQL, and Mongo. Ive never had to design tables or data. And this class is purely over design and data. Not one bit of administration. And it uses Zybooks. And that platform should be dumped 1 mile deep in a bunker and filled with concrete. Horrible horrible fucking platform. Its so bad even the teachers are like "no student, you figured it out. Ignore zybooks".
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@tzz@infosec.exchange 2026-05-14 18:49
@danirabbit@mastodon.online you were just in a D state :ablobcatnod:
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@naomi@theforkiverse.com 2026-05-14 19:03
@danirabbit@mastodon.online yep, I built a computer program in 1982 that basically did mail merge (and also stored persona-related information and targeted the content to fit the persona). I got a C
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@jasperspicace@defcon.social 2026-05-14 19:05
@danirabbit@mastodon.online Thanks I needed that.
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@vepr_jako_pepr@mastodon.social 2026-05-14 22:39
@danirabbit@mastodon.online yep true and also the other way round, dont let their praise abstract away your sense of need to work by your own sense of worth
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@fun@berkeley.edu.pl 2026-05-15 13:23
@danirabbit@mastodon.online and then you ended up building a whole ubuntu-based distro anyway Yes, anything is possible as long as you are motivated to do it ^^