FYP - How to fail? (in 20 points)
| DISCLAIMER: | |
|
→ This is cautionary↗; no supervisor wants their students to fail.
→ Just to reiterate: do the very opposite of everything that is written next. These are only common pitfalls in a tongue-in-cheek, reverse-psychology style, which can help you recognise and avoid these behaviours. |
Activelly pursue this to fail the FYP module:
- Don't ever communicate with your supervisor.
- Start working on the FYP late rather than early; let FYP tasks accumulate with other module's assignments.
- Don't act professionally while interacting with your supervisor.
- Be late and never prepare for meetings (fail to clearly explain your blockages or asking questions).
- Start coding at once, without planning or any design, or any architecture outline. Choose a programming language unfit for your project.
- Don't care about data, data ownership, items with user data, or any related ethics.
- Never meet your supervisor, and don't respond to meeting invites.
- Kickstart unrelated tasks, usually disconnected to the actual work required by the FYP (eg, early interviews with stakeholders, early data processing, early performance testing, early coding without requirements, and so on).
- Don't follow any advice or suggestion given by your supervisor.
- Leave to do everything by the very end, right before demonstration.
- Choose the wrong/inadequate tools, methods, and techniques for your project.
- Have a poor time management and not fixed routines.
- Don't follow any SDLC methodology, be the least formal while defining/eliciting requirements and documenting the process.
- Write a poor state-of-the-art section, with lots of Internet links and dubious/unreliable sources.
- LLM related
- Abuse employing LLMs to do the writing/analysing work for you.
- Mindlessly use of LLM's while sending e-mails to your supervisor.
- Don't ever consider other tools, methods, or techniques by other authors.
- Keep pivoting frequently, ie, changing directions on topics, on next tasks, etc.
- Care only about the Assessment Criteria and use the meeting's time to keep asking about marking, also how to enhance your marks artificially.
- Do the minimum amount of planning (only a few Use Cases - not producing any other diagrams, or US or no accompanying AC), and also coding (ask your supervisor, 'Will this so far make 40 marks?').
- Don't ever think doing usability testing with actual users.
- Forget that your supervisor is also evaluating you, not only the other assessor.
Strong suggestion: strive for doing a great remarkable FYP project.
Read this: Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task↗, by MIT Media Lab