I have been studying coding and decided to start with FreeCodeCamp because of its good reputation. However, today I realized a very obvious mistake in the website, and I want to learn the reason.
First, we can use forums to learn the answers, and spoiling will be prohibited by dedicated team members. However, we can already learn the answers just by clicking on the next step because it shows the codes of the previous steps even if we didn’t pass them.
At this point, I want to learn how I can search for a job after finishing this course. How can I persuade employers even if I can’t trust the reliability of the courses?
Yes, the answers are available simply by looking forward to the next step if you want to see them. I don’t know what that has got to do with reliability?
Employers want to see our success, not our copy-and-paste pace. I started and dedicated myself to the course to find the answers because I believe that it will be worth it for employers to get certification to show you understand and enact coding strategies. However, there is no difference between a coder who copies and pastes the next step and me, who tries to understand and find the correct answers by visiting the forum or Google. I wasted time trusting the course because of this obvious mistake.
In the certificate, it should have shown how many times I clicked the next steps before finishing the previous one. Otherwise, getting certified has a big “reliability” issue inevitably.
One key point which I think you may be overlooking is that - in order to achieve the certification for each course - you must complete a number of solo projects, for which no help/guidance is given. You would be unable to complete these unless you have learned the course materials properly.
Actually, I mentioned and emphasized exactly what I wanted. Example codes of the projects can be found anywhere on the different platforms. You can pass the projects with just small touch-ups that won’t show adequately that you complete all steps effectively without copying and pasting.
What I am curious about is why lots of dedicated team members are working to prevent spoiling when it is already given in the next step. Instead, they can develop a system that calculates or reports users’s attempts to see the next step. Even though I was thinking of this simple solution, why didn’t lots of team members think of it? Isn’t it quite peculiar for a website that is very reputable and recommended?
I see the misunderstanding. You believed that getting this certificate has some specific value beyond the personal feeling of achievement. It does not.
This certificate is given as a way to acknowledge your success in learning something. It is not for eg. an industry standard certificate given after a formal exam given in a controlled environment. Nor is it even equivalent to getting a university or college degree.
With respect to what employers look for, they will be looking for demonstrable knowledge of the technologies they deal with. This knowledge can only be demonstrated with any real reliability outside of the scope of fCC’s learning environment. For eg by developing a portfolio of unique projects. Or by volunteering to work as a web developer for a charity who can give your references for your work with them. Or by contributing to open source projects.
As to why we delete the answers on the forum, well as we always say, we don’t want the forum to spoil the answer for people who are here genuinely looking to learn it the hard way. People can google the answers online and they will have learned nothing and frankly speaking, they deserve the results of that (as you will reap what you sow). Only what is sown in tears can be harvested with laughter. And yes we expect learners to learn the hard way to achieve real knowledge. But it is up to them if they just want to get a certificate and move on from there.
This is certainly true, though that would be plagiarism, which is contrary to the FCC Academic Honesty Policy, which you are required to sign up to before any certification is awarded.
Cheating is an issue in all academic pursuits, especially with the advent of more advanced AI. Universities have always had to work hard to combat plagiarism, but they now also have the issue of AI-generated coursework/essays, which will only become increasingly difficult to detect.
I don’t how practicable or necessary it would be to try to block FCC users from seeing answers for steps which they haven’t yet completed, but ultimately, it’s usually pretty obvious when people have been cheating, plagiarising or using other methods to cut corners in their learning, and in cases where it’s clear that there has been dishonesty or attempts to ‘game the system’, any certifications gained in this way can be revoked.
I get the reason. Thanks for your effort to enlighten me about the demoralizing things in my mind. If I find any practical ways or codes to calculate attempts to see the answers from the next codes and reflect them on the certificate, I will share the method with you for free.
I hope this topic will be helpful to understand what the certification is for the other users.
i hope so too. Though to be fair, this has been discussed before on this forum. (you are not the first to wonder if the fCC certificate is really something that employers value)
some of the references you can find in this forum: