My Take & Advice

Comp TIA System Security. Quizzes are weekly. Quiz questions are pulled from the end of chapter Review Questions (~60%). The remaining quiz questions are made up by whoever made the curriculum. Some of them are ridiculous and require you to have a photographic memory. Some of them ask for obscure information within one of the many tables in a 30-50 page chapter. It’s like whoever created the quiz questions pulled out random data rather than thinking through what would be meaningful for the student to know. Just accept that and don’t spend hours and hours trying to memorize everything so you get a 100 (speaking from experience). Memorize the review questions. Study the concepts in the chapter. Pay special attention to the little notes beside images – they love to pull questions from those. Like these:

Focus on learning the material and don’t worry too much about the grade. You may understand everything exceedingly well and still miss a couple of questions because of the aforesaid ridiculousness of the questions. You have more important things to do with your time and you’ll still get an A in the class if you do the rest of your work well.
The text book is out of date and will say things like “by 2014 expect [X] a lot of people to be using social media”. :facepalm: Oh my!

Dear curriculum creators,

Please change the following:

• Make a Review Question guide.
• Don’t try to trick students with the quiz questions.
• Spell out Acronyms. Don’t just use acronyms. Many chapters introduce two dozen new acronyms, so don’t give instructions that say “set up an AP”. We have no idea what that means. We can’t really search for “AP” and come up with meaningful results.
• Do more teaching. Require the instructors to actually teach face to face each week. These are new concepts to us. Give us the buckets to hold the information before you turn on the firehose of information from the text book at us. Define things like: “A [X] is a physical piece of equipment, a [Y] is not, it’s a policy.” It’s hard to tell some of this from the reading. There is so much to take in – especially in the first several chapters.
• Have better hands on projects. Everything is Windows based –  like Windows 7 based. It’s so outdated. Mac’s aren’t even mentioned. The hands on projects should be applicable to the Mac operating system as well as Microsoft’s.