Evaluating your performance - are you doing well enough?

It is safe to say that the end goal of receiving an education is either entering the professional workforce, or progressing in your career.

From my observations, a significant students had job offers in their final year of studies, while some found jobs sometime after graduating. I only had a contract signed with my first job during my last semester, whereas some of my peers, who had offers months before me. But even then, it only happened in the final year of our 3 year bachelor's course. So how can this metric provide us feedback in our first semester, or year - it cannot!

I certainly would go mad if I considered myself a failure up until the moment of having a job offer in front of me, so let's have a look at measures that are far more immediate, optimistic and constructive.

Grades

It's been just over two years since my graduation, so it took digging up old paperwork to check up on the course weighted average. It sits at 75.63. FYI, no employer so far has asked to see this figure? The ancient saying "C's get degrees" stands true. Think about that when you visit a licensed health professional...

More seriously, academic results to bear some indication on how well you are doing. Grades for your weekly workshops and assignments should give a good indication of whether you are on your way of passing a class, or if you will need to put more effort in during the exams to get the mark you want. It will also indicate whether you are able to demonstrate knowledge of the topics covered so far and potentially identify gaps in your understanding. Clearly, that will not be the case if you cheat your way through assessments or bribe the teaching staff. Grades might also be subject to scaling, or other manipulations. It can also be affected by subjectivity of the teaching staff, with some being more generous than others.

Lastly, other events and factors can unjustly affect your marks, further distorting the true state of things. I once forgot to click submit on a programming assignment, having the submission only saved as a draft. The end result was me getting a grade of 95%, minus 20% for submitting 2 days late. Does this penalty suggest that the quality of work delivered is sub-par? I don't think so. Does this suggest that some of my soft skills like attention to detail are lacking? Perhaps so.

Comparing yourself to peers

Interacting with other students in your classes will let you see how well you are doing compared to others. I found that early on in the degree, there were students with a lot of prior knowledge - some did compsci at school, some did it as a hobby, some worked in IT and were studying to advance in their career, lastly some were repeating a particular class or even year. Myself, like many others, had a fairly limited understanding of computer science topics, and it certainly was intimidating at first to see someone else completing work faster and understanding concepts where I was struggling.

Early on, one of my lecturers called this out - they said that no matter how much prior knowledge you bring into the studies, you will end up in roughly the same spot as others, at the minimum, by the time you finish your degree. Obviously, you want to do better than the minimum. Many students who started with no knowledge, took it above and beyond when it came to learning and achieving positive outcomes. I also saw a lot of "early starters" drop off as the years went on, so do not become discouraged by this. Use it to identify areas for improvement and set goals to where you can be in the future.

Self-reflection, incremental improvements

There is a lot of value in taking a quiet break, and taking time to self-reflect on your progress. Here is one approach to help you get started - think of a topic or a concept that you currently struggle to understand or just haven had an opportunity to cover yet. Perhaps something specific on your class's syllabus.

It does not have to be groundbreaking. In a way, the approach that I'm pitching here is to focus on continued, stable growth, which only can be observed over periods of time. I remember being looking at my Data Structures and Algorithms study plan and wondering - what the heck are stacks, graphs, linked lists, and what does Vietnam have to do with it all. And yet, after a few weeks, I vividly remember realising that now I knew what these things were, how they worked, and even began to have an applied understanding of these concepts. Looking back at it now, it all seems to be trivial, and yet it was all part of the process. Reflecting back on my ignorance really helped understand whether I was on the right track in my studies.

Getting better at the process of learning

Studying computer science, or any other discipline is an accumulated result of solving n number of problems. Each lecture is a problem, solved by attending it and absorbing the knowledge. Each assignment, test or tutorial is a problem solved by completing it. Each programming bug you encounter is a problem waiting to be solved. At first, these will be difficult problems to solve. They will take time, they will be frustrating.

The amazing thing is that each time you solve a problem, solving a similar problem will become easier! My 10th assignment was much easier to complete than first, 20th was much easier to complete than 10th. And this is taking into account that later classes tend to be harder than, say, first year introductory courses. So pay attention to whether you are finding yourself getting better at the process of solving the variety of repeating problems you are facing. This is a good sign of progress. In a way, this is similar to a measure of making the same mistakes over and over again - something you don't want to be doing.

Confidence

Lastly, what I often found during my early studies and even now, is that my confidence in abilities was fairly low early on. But every success, every topic that I saw myself break down, digest and understand on a deep level, every light bulb moment, every program that I managed to get working after long nights of coding and debugging, all this resulted in my confidence as a IT professional grow. By the second year or so my attitude went from "Oh, I hope I can manage this semester" to "Bring it on. Throw your best at me!". There were and will be many times when the confidence levels are shook up by negative events and that is ok.

Overall however, it is a good indicator to develop a degree of confidence, based on positive outcomes, which in turn will promote more positive events. I might need to mention that the kind of fake, pretentious bravado is not the kind of attitude you should aspire to. The notion of "fake it till you make it" should only be relied upon to help alleviate the imposter syndrome, and nothing more.