What surprises me most are lame student excuses. Here’s a real conversation with a student who skipped all the labs. I edited it so you can’t tell from the context who it is. Spelling is the author’s own.
— Good evening. i understand that i attended your course poorly and was far from a diligent student, but there were good reasons for that. I worked a lot and couldn’t devote time to uni. I don’t have credit for the course ***, is it possible to resolve this problem?
— Do the labs, then come defend them.
— if i could do labs, i wouldn’t be working at ***, i’d be doing part-time programming. But since I need money, I work there.
— How many hours a week do you work?
— shifts are 10–11 hours for night ones, day ones are 9, i work 5 days a week
— So you still have time to study?
— more like time to sleep than to study
— There are 168 hours in a week. Of those, 55 hours go to work. 56 to proper sleep. You still have 57 hours to do my labs.
After that the conversation moved into the “yeah, and I don’t have those 57 hours either” territory. The course had 5 lab assignments, 4 academic hours each. That is, at most 20 hours were needed to do them. A “smart guy” can do my labs in two days. And there really were people who did the whole course in three days.
Needless to say, this student did nothing.
Unfortunately, KhNURE has rotted so much that, without having credit for my course, without lifting a finger, he received a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering.
Needless to say, employers in Kharkiv don’t look at diplomas at all.