Compensation for Low Quality Material.

To Noroff   

We, the students who have put their names and signatures to this letter, demand a compensation due to the lack of good quality material during our courses in Introduction to Programming and Discrete Mathematics at Noroff. 

The reason we ask for a deduction is: 

Discrete Mathematics 

The overall quality of Discrete Mathematics and the abysmal presentation of assessment 1 raised conserns early in the course. As we made aware to you, there were several mistakes in the multiple-choice answers provided to the questions, where none of the solutions were correct.  

This, however, was not the only issue with the course: Some lectures were missing theoretical content, the teacher lacked proper equipment to present the tutorial, as well as the tutorial solutions which were partially complete or directly false. The issue had been brought to your attention but there were no concrete corrective measures taken to rectify the situation in good time to enable students to get value for their money.

The Education Committee and student representatives for year one requested assessment 1 to be postponed until the material and solutions were corrected and explained properly, including doublechecking the solutions to assessment 1 before release. The postponement was granted, though the issues remained unresolved, and students were forced to take an assessment based on insufficient knowledge, filled with mistakes. The uncertainty caused together with the poor presentation of the material, forced students to find knowledge on sites such as youtube and udemy.

At the time this letter is being written, the students have learned that the grade will be released on a later date than advertised, but only when a student made a request regarding the grade. The fact that Noroff respects their students so little that they cannot even post an update regarding their grade, is disappointing.  

Introduction to Programming 

In Introduction to programming the quality was equally poor, where the tutorial sessions were not recorded. Thus, making it impossible for some students to get the full benefits of those tutorials because not all the content and not all the time was covered in lectures.  

For the students taking the resit, the weekly practice tests were only made accessable three days before the assessment, and 25 days after the students received a confirmation that they qualified for a resit. For some the practice tests weren't opened at all, they were closed at one point, and reopened on another. These tests were great for practicing toward how the assessment worked, and the activities aided to understand the material. Withholding such a valuable learning opportunity for students who are already struggling made practicing more difficult than necessary. 

As the tutorials were not recorded, many students missed valuable discussions and learning experiences. To compensate for this, our teacher made an extra effort to record solutions to activities. Unfortunately, these solutions were not published until the week before the exam. Considering the amount and length of these tutorials, it was impossible to run through them unless you only needed to “fill your cup up”. Students struggling with intermediate material did not stand a chance to learn everything, and ended up with unfulfilled academic “holes”. Releasing these tutorials by the end of the week they were presented would have filled these gaps at an earlier basis, strengthening the knowledge and thus making it easier to understand the intermediate concepts.  

Unlike other universities (NTNU, Høyskolen Kristiania) that choose to wait with OOP and "classes" until earliest the 2’nd semester, Noroff university college and vocational choose to “push forward”. The short amount of time of five weeks that a student is expected to learn an intermediate level of coding is beyond what is normally expected. This makes the material unnecessary difficult, and sets the student up to fail.  

Such poor education constitutes a breach of contract as the quality of education that was promised was not delivered, therefore it is only fair that the students receive a compensation.

We must ask for a confirmation on the compensation by Friday the 22'nd of January, 1 pm.   

Regards,   

The below signed students. 

The Education Committee    Contact the author of the petition