So today I am working on the GIS Certification Institute application to become a Geographic Information Systems Professional. Being completely honest here, the application is a complete pain in the … as it were. Having gone through a number of other certification programs, this is by far the worst I’ve ever worked on. Hopefully from here on out it will go smoothly, but griping about that isn’t the point of this post. The point here falls more to the academic side where I’m still sitting.
So the story… I’ve been sitting in the lab all morning plugging away at the application, and there are a number of students in the main instructional lab presumably working on homework for summer session classes or their theses. Still it seems that every time I walk into the lab to get to the printer, or to speak with faculty about any number of topics that I’m working on back here, I get inundated with the “how do you do..” questions, which is all well and good when an undergraduate student who has never had a GIS class asks or when the task is marginally complex, but some of the things that I’m getting asked are fairly self explanatory if you spend a minute to figure out what you’re doing.
And here’s where the ethics comes into play here; finally you’re saying. If I point click the students through the task they won’t learn anything, if I point click them through it they aren’t even doing their work. So lets call this my official declaration that I’m not going to help students anymore here in Akron — I’ll help point you to where the information that will help you answer the question is, but I’m not going to answer it; cowboy up and solve the problem yourself. That’s why you’re here on your “summer break” anyway. I say this as an ethics thing because I’m considering it part of my professional contribution to the “faith”. Time for y’all to “get some” for yourselves. Good luck and happy hunting.
