10 ways to make university IT assignments more relevant to industry.

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"10 ways to make university IT assignments more relevant to industry."

 1) Change the assignment several times while students are working on it.

 2) Assign 5 new members to the team 2 days before the assignment is
due, claiming extra resources are needed. The students are told that
'mythical man month' does not apply in this case because of awesome
management skills.

 3) Have the best programmer in the team designated 'programmer'. Then
 have other members fill the roles of 'manager', 'second in charge',
 'systems documenter', 'risk analysis officer', 'system analyst' and
 'software tester'. Everyone can say the programmer is not an
 important part of the team and does no real work. Everyone gets more
 grades than the programmer. Everyone gets to blame the programmer if
 the assignment is running late.

 4) Request all work be done between 9am to 5pm. Anyone arriving to
 assignment late is docked marks. The non-programmer who stays back
 latest it awarded the highest grade, everyone else did not stay back
 long enough. Any programmer staying back late is deemed to be behind
 schedule and has to explain their lapse to the entire team at the
 next 'scrum'.

 5) Every week the IT assignment group (except the 'programmer') must
 meet with a MBA student group. The MBA students get to arbitrarily
 change the IT assignment groups project in anyway they please.

 6) Every fortnight some marketing students explain to the lecturer
 that IT students are a 'cost center' while marketing is a 'profit
 center'. The lecture will take some marks from the IT students and
 give them to the marketing students.

 7) The marketing students project is to set new requirements for the
 IT groups project. The more ambitious the requirement the better
 their grade. Any requirement that is not delivered by the IT group's
 assignment, is entirely the fault of the IT group.

 The IT students will have to complete 'assignment 2.0' the following
 year. They will have a team of Indian exchange students to help the
 programmer. The team also gets a student from the psychology
 department to be called 'HR officer'. This student deals with the
 team so that the IT student who is 'manager' does not have to get so
 stressed.

 9) In the final year of study they will have to complete 'assignment
 3.0'. In this year the IT project group will be acquired by another
 university and will have to integrate their assignment with the
 assignment from another group in the new university.

 10) If the students in the economics school school fail a test, the
 MBA student team gets to retrench a non-manager IT student from the
 project. The retrenched IT student is not trust-able, so the student
 will have his uni login and access cards secretly disabled. The IT
 student will discover he/she is no longer part of the team when
 trying to use their access card or login to a computer. This causes a
 team of security guard trainees to appear and escort the student off
 the university premises.