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An interesting question because it leads to deeper questions regarding the correlations between definitions of education, testing, and group dynamics.Partially because of my temperament and partially because of my areas of interest and expertise (the social sciences) depending on the course, I had largely dispensed with quantitative testing in favor of student-driven presentations or flipped classes, and any tests I had given were mostly to help the students troubleshoot their own weakness and increase intrinsive-motivation to rectify those weakness.Such ‘tests’ often involved a non-zero sum strategies to encourage collaborative problem solving for worthy goals. In large lecture type classes, I even encouraged students to ‘cheat’ by looking at peering at knowledgable student’s papers next to the, and using that as part of their own answer … provided they discuss the problem with that more knowledgable student to understand as to why that answer had emerged. Often, a peer student understands each other’s gap in understanding better than the teacher.I try to make a test as fun as possible. The test is typically the climax of a course, and I looked at a well designed course as I would look at a fine meal, with the desert served last, or as a difficult but interesting movie in which the climax of the semester is for integrating the material with other courses and their personal life, a kind of a climax to the movie. Rather than ending the semester with the student leaving the class think ‘Wheww, I am glad that is finally over’, I would rather have them ending the semester thinking ‘Wow, I didn’t realize how interesting and relevant that material was to other courses, as well my own personal life. Now it all makes sense, but I have even more questions and would like to dig a little deeper. And I made some new friends in the process.’Such few tests as there were, tended to be a part of the educational process rather than a comparison of students for memorization skills, a combination of peer evaluation and self evaluation … again with myself avoiding judging or comparing unique students with each other on a standardized scale.In such a facilitating role, I would have found it problematic to outsource a third party to evaluate student performances because it would have most likely compromised any relationships I had built as a fcacilitator …. but I recognize that I am somewhat an unconventional instructor. So I would hesitate to recommend the above heuristics as an institutional policy.But for myself, I have often ended the semester feeling it has been an adventure, and I am sorry to see it end, and hoping the students feel the same. Life is too short for the transactional attitude of teaching as an obligation for receiving an income, and students studying as an obligation for obtaining a future income. To me, that is mere training as opposed to collaborative, empathetic, problem solving, education, mere institutionalization of human capital as opposed to socialization of empathic members of overlapping communities — what I think should be the priority of education.Outsourcing someone who has not participated in such a collaborative adventure, and has not formed bonds with either myself or other members of the class, would not even enter my mind because of the unique group dynamics that are important for making up any class for which I an responsible. I don’t distinguish collaborative work and just plain fun.Meh, but what do I know? The real world of teaching as a job, and the ideal world of teaching as a calling, are quite different. Maybe that is why I am now no longer unemployed in Japan’s education industry. It’s hard enough even to find permission to volunteer as a teacher over here. Maybe it’s just me.

Hey there, I'm Marcus, one of the founders of Hack Reactor. Here's the short and the long versions of your answer!In short:Our course forms the basis for a decade of professional success, so we set a high tuition and use it to offer amazing resources to our students. The money goes towards building the best available curriculum, facilities, instructors, and student body. This pays off in employer perception, placement rate (100% so far), and average placement salary (6 figures for our most recent class). It's clear at this point that we're leading our industry in course quality and student outcomes.These schools are not commodities with roughly similar pros and cons--the curriculum and experience are vastly different from program to program. I'm very glad that there are so many schools popping up to support the huge need for software education, but outstanding students who want to make the most of a big opportunity like this should definitely come to Hack Reactor. We're able to pour a lot more into your education, and as a result we can provide you with better experience while you're here and more confidence finding work as a developer once you're done.Interestingly, our tuition premium also gives us the ability to accommodate students with financial restrictions--we're unique in offering a deferral program for outstanding applicants.In detail:People applying to this type of program are putting everything they have on hold for several months to learn a new skill that will completely change their lives. As I see it, the last thing you want to do in that situation is to take risks with your future. You should make a point of investing deeply in those transitional months, and go with the highest quality program you can get yourself into. Remember, you're trying to be competitive in the software industry while sidestepping an exorbitant university degree that requires four years to earn. It's wise not to cut corners in that position. If you really want to succeed on such a compressed timeframe, you need every advantage you can get.We designed Hack Reactor to be the best schooling experience available anywhere for bright coders, so we pour extra resources into every facet of it. Here's a breakdown of where our time, energy, and money goes.Quantity of instruction:The base class hours are from 9am-8pm for 12 weeks, totaling about 800 hours of official, staffed class time. In addition, there are several more weeks of support and curriculum material before and after the course. As such, Hack Reactor simply provides more class overall. In your first week alone, I personally spend about 30 hours with you in lecture and discussion formats, to compliment the other 30+ hours you'll spend programming under the supervision of our instructors. Of course, most students wind up staying even later to be close to the enthusiastic staff, peers, alumni, and founders who love talking about code at all hours of the night. Our commitment to excellence is a two-way street though. While that intensity certainly isn't for everyone, the most successful graduates are consistently the ones who seek out that sort of commitment, and actually enjoy learning to code the whole time. This brings me to the issue of the people you'll be learning alongside of.Quality of your peers:People learn a lot through osmosis, so it behooves you to surround yourself with the smartest, most dedicated people you can. Hack Reactor is a tiny school designed for the brightest applicants out there. Since we aren't interested in expanding all over the place, we have the luxury of accepting only the cream of the cream of the crop. Interviews take a long time, and it's a big investment for us to get expert instructors evaluating so many applicants, but that means the tiny fraction of students who do make it in (two point something percent) are a gang of superhero intellects.Quantity and quality of instructors:For our part, we've chosen the least scalable model we could think of: lots of human care and attention. Despite being such a small school, our students enjoy the assistance of 8 full time and 9 part time instructors--plus the help of a bunch of folks working in the background to their benefit, doing things like project management for your real-world contract work, and company relations to help connect you with the job you're looking for. Our instructors come from companies like Twitter, Google, OKCupid, and Adobe. It's hard to procure that level of talent for the classroom, but we think it's well worth the investment.Practical tools and real-world paid contract work:During the project phase, we coordinate with actual clients to match students up with paid development contracts, and pay the cost of managing the project. The student keeps the entire fee earned from the project. An instructor reviews the student's code extensively to ensure that their customer will be happy with the product they produce, and to help the student learn the advanced lessons you only get from using your judgement on the job. You'll be prepared for this level of responsibility, because from day one the curriculum is designed around tools in use in the industry like Git, Backbone, Rails, Node, Unix, and TDD testing frameworks.Facilities and location:We can't spare a minute of our students' time for something as unfulfilling as a commute, so we operate from an office right on Market Street, the main drag in downtown SF, about 50 feet from the BART + MUNI station. Since our students spend all their time here together, we wanted it to be as comfortable here as at it is at home--which is why we chose such a large, bright, top floor space with an open floor plan. Every morning, there are excited students meeting in the space for coffee or tea, well before class even starts. Personally, I find the energy in this building unbeatable, and as the students can tell you, I spend all my days off here simply because it's fun.This is what it feels like as a student, gathering in the presentation area to hear battle stories from an alumni panel:Investment in our alumni:We have a strong alumni network who love giving back to the program, many of whom visit on a daily or weekly basis to support the next generation of HackRs. Due to the seniority of the roles our alums have been able to procure immediately after graduating, they are often tasked with hiring within weeks of starting their new jobs. So we consider their dedication to the community to be one of the best assets we have a chance of supporting. As an example, last night we took a class full of previous students out to karaoke because, 1) we love the heck out of them and, 2) we want to make sure they have every opportunity to stay close, collaborate, and help each other soar for the rest of their careers.Quality of curriculum materials:Of everything we do though, the curriculum itself is what excites me the most. My job is to design the learning experience from start to finish, and I implemented it with the help of several brilliant engineers and teachers. Having taught and written curriculum for so many years now, it thrills me to have an excuse to dote on the details of these materials as much as I do. Elsewhere in the tech industry, you'll frequently be asked to slap something together quickly and move on. One of the major reasons I chose to work on the challenges at Hack Reactor over continuing to work on challenges at Twitter was the fact that Hack Reactor primarily needs me to hone and polish this learning experience to be as amazing as it possibly can. I've heard from a number of students now that they wish learning on the job were as fast paced and well paved as the Hack Reactor curriculum, which is of course always delightful to hear.I hope I have a chance to collaborate with you on your hacker journey! If you're interested in testing your hand at coding, or find out how far you've come, reach out to us at [email protected]. Our interviews are designed as a learning process, so you'll get access to some of the same materials we use in our teaching every day.

The most important reform we could make in public education is to align what we teach, and how it is taught, with the insights offered through the sciences of neurobiology, developmental psychology, and neurodevelopmental psychology. Compared to twenty years ago, we know exponentially more about how humans naturally learn, how children learn, what is likely to promote learning, and what is almost certain to inhibit it.Here are some changes I would suggest in the light of new understanding. Don't misinterpret this as an argument against rigor:1. Failure should never be stigmatized. In a way, it should be encouraged. People learn by making mistakes. Lack of effort is what teachers need to be concerned with. Those who fail more will often end up learning more.2. The time element for learning must be minimized. People learn in different ways, at different speeds. and at different speeds for different subjects. Some people take more time to learn something but they learn it more completely. They can generalize what they have learned and apply unifying principles to other matters. Perhaps they have made more mistakes and those mistakes have contributed to learning more deeply. This implies that grade levels need to be eliminated. If one person has been accessed to have learned what he or she needs to know, they graduate. If another takes an extra year, it is unimportant. Passing scores, however, need to be close to 100% for all students.3. Play needs to be re-associated with learning. Play should not be a reward for the work of learning. Learning should be, as much as is possible, enjoyable. Even learning the times-tables (rote learning) can be made more fun. To assess whether the learning in a classroom is being disassociated from fun, assess the level of curiosity. Incurious children, and adults, learn only what they feel they need to, to get to where they feel they need to go. In school that means grades. The likelihood of the kind of deep learning that results in the student mastering a subject tends to be directly proportional to the driving force of learning; curiosity. It is not natural for the level of curiosity in children to tend to diminish in public school from Grade One onward.4. Learning to connect the dots is more important than accumulating dots. By dots I am referring to factoids, or the quanta of data or information, such as the USA entered World War II in 1941. We have a public education system that has evolved little from its 19th century roots. In fact, with the present obsession with high-stakes testing, rote learning has come back into vogue. We are back in the 19th century. The attempt to roll back the, so called, “radical educational experiments” of the nineteen sixties have succeeded. That needs to be reversed. Minimal rote leaning might be occasionally needed to prime the educational pump, but it is so much more beneficial to learn facts as a by-product of learning methodology. In other words, learning general principals seems to naturally precede learning details for our species. The key skill taught in school, therefore, should be methodology for how to determine what you need to know to get a task done, and how to access that information. You can find out in less than a minute which English king ordered the waves to retreat by googling the question. Knowing what that tale implies, that is deciphering its meaning, and understanding how that lesson can apply to life in the present; that is learning from history as opposed to merely learning history. That is also a higher form of intelligence, often referred to as “general intelligence”, while specific or specialized intelligence is what we are already beginning to get from A.I. computation and falls far short of the intellectual capacities that humans are born with.5. Homework and cramming need to be eliminated or minimized. Or homework should become schoolwork. Since so much of the average school day is demonstrably nonproductive in terms of true learning - meaning the kind of learning that lasts longer than a few days after a student has taken a high-stakes test - most of what is now homework could be done within a seven hour school day. Educators and parents need to recognize that non-school activities, peer socializing, and just unstructured knocking about, can be as conducive to learning as being in a structured classroom.6. It's not that there is too much nor that there is not enough structure in today's classroom. Its the kind of structure that matters. Students have to be allowed to take tangents and long-cuts. Students have to be not just allowed but encouraged to question assumptions and fundamental premises. To challenge conventional thinking and the 'consensual reality' is a human and student right, perhaps even a duty. This defines a natural process for human learning and results in new discoveries for the student, It even occasionally results in new insights or discoveries for the rest of us as well. Incorporating the process of individual discovery into a curriculum should be a no-brainer. If students are allowed the time to play around within a given project they will find out who they are and how they learn largely, although not entirely, on their own. Certainly there are times when minimum supervision is for the good. The structure within a classroom needs to accommodate not just the various ways people learn but the fact that it is play more than necessity that is really the mother of invention.7. Tests should be only one instrument of assessment, and as much for assessing the teaching as the learning. Since it is the process of learning, and the process of thinking, that is most important (again connecting dots rather than accumulating dots) that is what most needs to be assessed. The student's teacher, not the test creator, is best equipped to assess that. This implies class sizes small enough and enough one-to-one time for a teacher to get to know his or her students.8. Every student must feel protected, comfortable, and unconditionally accepted in the class room. Every child deserves to be there and every child needs to get that message. Behavior needs to be studied to determine why a given student might tend towards acting out inappropriately. There is always a reason. Compassion needs to be the guiding principle. Punishment needs to be rare and shaped by a compassionate knowledgeable teacher or administrator. (All children will act inappropriately some times.) Reflexive, top-down, dictatorial authority will result in oppositional psychology for a healthy individual. The possibility for a positive change in the behavior of a child is chained to his or her understanding that the adult, or authority figure, dishing out consequences is motivated by concern for the student, not vindictiveness. That cannot be faked. Students can instantly sense the difference. Teachers who are constitutionally incapable of empathy for the students they are entrusted with are in the wrong profession. Fear does not motivate deep learning. If there is any foundation for creating a learning environment, that is it.All of the above is congruent with the findings of current developmental science. Children react to implicit memories and inner emotional turmoil, often without much self-understanding. Especially in the first few years of life, but continuing throughout life, the brain wires itself and rewires itself as a consequence of environmental factors. Neurons that fire together tend to stay together. The brain should no longer be viewed as a fixed thing but as a plastic thing, an organ that will physically change for the positive in response to an attentive carrying environment, or to the negative in an inattentive uncaring environment. Immaturity is to be expected of children, by definition. That stated, children act out impulsively for a reason. The blame game must stop for the learning game to continue. Emotional health is not a side-issue for education, but its foundation.The unifying concept here is that anti-social behavior, or self-destructive behavior, or self-aggrandizing behavior, or self-deprecating behavior, all tend to be emerging from an underlying source. Almost always negative behavior relates to the child's deep-seated feelings of inferiority and his or her lack of mental well-being. All of that is best understood as the consequences of a negative environment, probably at home more than at school. The misbehaving child is defending herself, albeit poorly, but that is her underlying motivation. Misbehavior isn't to be tolerated, of course, but consequences need to be designed that are in the best interest of the child. The blame game is to be avoided, If a child has been largely ignored in the first two years of life, is she or he to be blamed for acting badly in kindergarten? A child might need to be removed from the proximity of other students,but that step has to be understood as temporary. It has to be understood that way by the child.The trick is, I think, that freedom should be granted in direct proportion to the responsibility taken. For example, after a certain age, students should not be punished for being absent from class. But the consequence of missing classes is that he or she will have to put in the time to meet course requirements. (Remember every students needs to earn the equivalent of an ‘A’ before being allowed to move up the ladder.) This kind of social contract, obviously, is something that a student matures into. The freedom and responsibility threshold needs to advance over time, but that process needs to happen. It needs to be an educational goal, and a conscious and ongoing process involving teachers and students. Grade ten students should not be required to ask a teacher for permission to go to the bathroom. This transition into adulthood where freedom is conscientiously balanced by responsibility needs to be designed into the school experience.(In California, moving out of high school and an atmosphere of what feels like to many students a minimum security prison, and then abruptly moving into the institutional freedom offered in a college, requires a psychological transition that at least 50% of students fail to make.)Obviously the above means that I take a radical view that our public education system needs to be fundamentally reinvented if we are to expect student outcomes to radically improve. And they must, if we are survive as a democratic nation and if the ecosphere is to be conducive to future life on this planet. The solution to a failing school system, however, is not offering less carrot to students and applying more stick to their rear-ends. The solution is equally not union busting, nor is it upping the education standards - although they need not only upping but a thorough rethinking. It is also not soft or corrupt teacher evaluation that is the central problem, although retraining of teachers may have to be made a national mandate. The truth is that scapegoating teachers or blaming lazy or undisciplined students will only make matters worse. To go on mistaking symptoms for causes will invite further disaster.The worst thing we do to students in the public education system is convince them on an emotional level, where it counts most, that we adults don't really care about them, and that school is the opposite of fun. That must be changed.Suggested related reading: Scattered, In The Land Of Hungry Ghosts, Gabor Mate MD