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I helped to set up a syllabus for a part time coding bootcamp. One of the things we did was to eliminate any grading, although students who completed the project would get to graduate with honors.

The idea was that when I was in college, I found a lot of students avoiding the electives where they would learn a lot, in favor of electives where it was easier to get good grades.

The good part was that we could push them extremely hard. There's a point where most of them feel like it's not the right career choice and we can push them past that plateau. Since a lot of them are doing it at night and weekends, they don't always have a lot of willpower or commitment. The drop out rate is a little lower than expected.

The bad part is that they don't push themselves hard enough. A lot of the difficulty is in things that they can just grind through - loops, arrays, functions, conditionals. But they don't work hard enough at it, and don't become 'literate' enough to solve some basic problems.

The other downside is that a diploma sells certification, and not necessarily education. Something that's easy to pass is 'not recognized', even if the students learn more in the end.



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