No wonder there's no trees in Birmingham

So I've just printed off my submission for my coursework - which was to create an Intelligent Knowledge Based System (IKBS) using lisp, and it's ridiculous. We were asked for some unknown reason to print from the line printer, and the result is that I've got a small tree sitting next to me right now.

The lecturer marking my submission hasn't even asked for the actual program to be submitted to him, merely a printout of the code and a printout of 'sample conversation' with the program, which I could really easily have hacked. So, given that my submission could have been of much higher quality if it had been electronic (printing screwed up a bunch of my formatting too, as line printers wrap after every 72 chars), I'm naturally rather annoyed that I just spent two hours and a couple of pounds to waste a ton of paper on this submission.

Here is the letter I therefore sent to the lecturer, and cc'ed to the CS2 year tutor and the Courses Director, if you're interested. Revision again now.


Hi Chris,

I've just finished off my CS2250 coursework for final submission (a bit late I know, but the code was finished a while back, I've just been getting user input for the database) and I'm afraid I'm rather unhappy with the submission specification.

I've got 40 pages from the line printer sitting next to me, and though I was prepared to write off the extra effort and cost of printing via that medium, I hadn't realised quite how much paper the line printer took up. Contrary to what your specification says - it's certainly not standard practise to print from the line printer - no-one's ever asked us to do that before! So, my first concern is the environmental aspect - I'm sure there's at least a hundred students on CS2, and I dread to think what portion of a forest you're going to get handed in to you from all of their submissions, I'm sure there's a small tree used up just for mine. Also, incidentally, I doubt you'll be able to read any of the scoring tables in my code, as the line printer cuts off lines after a certain number of characters, which really messes up the formatting of the code.

Secondly, I've created a very intuitive, user-friendly program which actually manages to provide pretty good advice. However, it seems you'll have to just take my word for that, because you don't actually appear to want the program that you're marking submitted to you. I've attached my actual knowledge database to this email, because you haven't even asked to see that, which really makes me wonder how you can tell if my program is delivering good advice or bad. In my database, I could very easily have hacked a certain value, so that one particular film will always come up as the most recommended, and then asked for all the features of that film in my dribble.txt file - and you'd be none the wiser. You also lose out on the entire feel of the program, and unless I spent 20 minutes in front of the console with dribble turned on, you're never going to see the output of everything you can do with the program.

Therefore, could I suggest that in future you merely ask for electronic submissions of coursework? It would save every student time and money, it would save the environment a very large amount of paper being wasted, and it would allow you to see the programs that you're marking. You'll be able to see all the code nicely formatted and be able to try out any functions that aren't immediately obvious in their intention, instead of working through reams of paper to attempt to visualise their output and how they fit into the program as a whole.

I've cc'ed Sylvia Wong & Lesley Wood into this - could I suggest that for the reasons above you review the 'standard' practises for CS and consider electronic submissions as a rule where possible, and any form of printing for submissions where a physical hand in is absolutely neccessary? The line printing doesn't really add any extra security - with a bit of effort I'm sure any CS student could bypass whatever it is the line printer is meant to be securing, problem solving and hacking are pretty much what we're learning here :)

Finally, please don't take this as a negative comment about the course - I enjoyed your lectures and I've had great fun learning lisp and doing my coursework and I'm sure it'll come in handy for me in the future. My IKBS is already being used as a real-life application by myself and friends to find films to watch, and it'll only get more and more useful and reliable as more films are added to it every time it's used. My concerns are only with the actual hand-in specification.

Cheers, and happy new year.
Ian.

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