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Problems With Truncation On the Common Application
jaroslav writes "A combination of rigid caps on space and poor documentation of the space limits is adding stress on students applying for college using the Common Application, the New York Times reports. The story explains that the application lists word limits for questions, but actually enforces space limits. As a result, an answer with wide characters, such as 'w' or 'm,' may run over space even without reaching the stated word limit. It is not explained why an electronic submission must have such strictly enforced limits."
Solution: Use a fixed-width font when printing and change the limit to a character limit rather than a word limit.
Then again, these types of issues are often steered by people who have no idea how to manage a project or engineer a system. They fail to understand the problem or research a solution and instead pick the first solution they find regardless of how well it meets the needs of people involved.
Case in point: I work for a public school district. There is a county-wide initiative which requires additional testing forms to be filled out to determine if each district is meeting goals of the county-wide entity. The tests are all multiple-choice selections. Do they use a web-based form which submits to a database? No. Do they perhaps leverage the tried-and-true scantron forms that students have used for multiple choice tests for the better part of 30 years and the school has reams and reams of? No. Do they perhaps use the Canon copiers which they just leased and got a service contract for this year and are district-wide and have built-in document scanning? No.
Here's what they do. They want teachers to administer the tests. No problem there. Then they need to fill out specialized bubble forms which are downloaded using special login and passwords on a vendor website we don't control in any way. If passwords don't work then the teacher is out of luck for about a week. Then they use custom software and individual document scanners to scan these forms and encode the data for collection. These scanners are expensive, and the software is per-install licensed. There is only enough money for one scanner and software license per high school. So each high school -- some of which have 50 or more teachers collecting data -- now have a single kiosk computer set up to scan these forms which the teachers have to reserve time for. The few middle school teachers who also need to do this need to come to the high schools to do this work. The high schools and middle schools are not located close to each other at all. But it gets better. They alloted money for the scanners, but nothing for the computers. They're forced to cannibalize one computer from a computer lab in each school... all of which had classes at max capacity. I don't know what the teachers in those classes are doing for the student who has no PC. Additionally, the software is really picky. It requires you to calibrate the scanner. To calibrate the scanner, you must download another form and fill it out as requested using the same pen or pencil you used on the other forms. You must do this for each class -- that's right not each teacher, but each class -- because the forms can vary from class to class. The only saving grace of all this is that the scanners themselves are really nice and work very well, but they ought to at the price we're paying. We're just hoping that the volume these scanners will need to handle doesn't cause jamming. We don't have a service agreement on these scanners, so if they break we'll have to figure them out ourselves or buy more scanners.
This is what happens when you make a technical decision without consulting with technical people. You make everyone's life a living nightmare and waste hundreds of hours and thousands of tax dollars. You virtually guarantee that the data will not be gathered in a timely manner and that the project is likely to fail.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
College isn't the ability to do something in a given field well. That is part of it, sure. But not the biggest part. What college teaches you is how to perform a long and difficult and often times utterly pointless task and be stubborn enough to see it through to the end. That's why lots of jobs have "college degree" as a requirement but they don't care which one you have. What they are looking for is someone who would move an entire bag of rice into a bucket and use chopsticks to do it and not complain. College will teach you this. This entry form is an example.
That's why the poster is confused about the bizarre space width requirement. It's a hurdle. That is its function. It doesn't have to make sense. It would be unrealistic if it did. PLENTY of things along the way in your education will not make any sense at all. It is important that you learn this. The task, whatever it is, must be done. And it must be done, and done in the way asked - regardless of how bizarre it seems. Or even if you have a better idea that would be faster/better/more efficient. No. Do it this way, in the way asked and the time allocated, and get it done.
It is the perfect training ground for life in the job market into which you will be dropped into here in a few years.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.