Konrads Smelkovs

S/N: 070320556 Phone: 07990987057 Email: konrads@smelkovs.com

` Chief Operating Officer External System

University of London Stewart House 32 Russell Square London WC1B 5DN

Dear Sir
I am writing to you to ask for an exemption from homework grading regulations regarding deadlines for the reasons outlined below. I am also writing to you to share my concerns about the quality of assignments given to students. In the academic year 2008/9 I undertook the second year courses of BSc Computing study programme. Unfortunately, I did not submit all of my homework, and although passing exams I failed the course overall. In 2009/10 I was forced to take a break due to financial constraints and in current academic year (2010/11) I attempted to complete the 2nd year studies by submitting remaining homework. Initially, there were issues with paying continuing registration fees I submitted my application over post, but by the time the payment was being processed, my credit card had expired and due to my relocation to UK, it took a while before I had another one. Nonetheless on February 7, 2011 I paid all outstanding fees and submitted an inquiry (reference 96760) asking how to proceed from there how and by what deadlines I should submit my homework. I received no reply apart from confirming that my payment has been received. I retrospect I should have persevered and should have called and emailed repeatedly, but I expected that this query as it was duly recorded in your inquiry system would be dealt eventually. There was no further communication from the University regarding this matter. Ultimately, I submitted my homework on May 2nd and it was duly received by University. I thereby ask you to grade my homework as if it was submitted on time, as I was unaware of deadlines and did not receive necessary information about the deadlines on time. While I am no member of academic community and having no first-hand experience in designing academic syllabus, but being an IT professional and employed in the area for over ten years (currently in KPMG as information security consultant), I would like to share some of my concerns about the assignment quality: y 2910222 Assignment IV is about designing a network for a private company. The assignment contains broken links and references to discontinued products of BT. Furthermore, the assignment in the bandwidth requirements does not identify units of measurement is it kilobits/s, megabits/s or maybe even gigabits/s. If the units of measurement are kilobits/s then no network planning need to take place, as basic consumer technologies are sufficient. If measurement is in megabits/s then arguably to handle traffic

of 2Gbit/s between offices would need much more advanced planning than the study guide prepares for it and there arent any alternatives to wired network (which assignment requires identifying). Furthermore, most enterprises that need dedicated connectivity have switched to MPLS technology which study guide, again, does not cover. 2910226 assignment II requires performing a risk analysis of previously designed solution. The study guide does not mention anywhere risk analysis. While it may be expected of the student to learn about the topic on his own without guidance, having experience in risk analysis in mission critical applications, for example, risk analysis of a national certification authority which issues certificates and manufactures ID cards, I know that there are many approaches, issues and objectives of risk analysis. Not providing student with a robust framework for assignment and guidance makes the entire exercise confusing. 2910209 assignments I and II require student to perform network measurements. Unfortunately, the techniques described are no longer working in 2010 or 2011. Specifically, student is asked to perform traceroute to identified hosts. A classic traceroute uses a UDP packet as its carrier and many networks have firewalls in place that drop all packets which are not destined for a valid service. For example, if the only service on that IP address is a web homepage which operates on port 80/tcp, it is not uncommon for any other packet to be filtered on ingress, leaving the student unable to complete the task for this specific host and forcing him to seek others. Instead, student should have been equipped with tools that would do traceroute using tcp/80 SYN packet (for example, by using the free and open source tool nmap with its -traceroute feature). Furthermore many ISPs, especially in UK perform traffic shaping and management for end users and depending on the load of nearest network congestion point, such as DSL telephone exchange, results can be highly varying even within an hour and student will be unable to draw reasonable conclusions!

I would like to suggest some improvements to syllabus: y To teach purely functional programming I would suggest choosing Haskell over SML. It has all characteristics necessary to teach functional programming style, but in addition has a vibrant community that the student can use for his support and is actually used in real world applications giving the student skills he can take to market. For example, the open source project tracker indicates 85 registered Haskell projects and less than 10 projects relevant to SML I suggest reworking the assignments 1 and 2 of 2910212 whereby a student was required to build an interface for an underwater robot. While enabling creativity is always encouraged, the student would be better served if he could build a mock business application where he could reasonably gather requirements and execute them. He would still demonstrate the knowledge of same Java concepts Swing UI, inheritance, threading and multimedia, but have a project under his belt that he can take to job market as a proof of experience. Furthermore, I was surprised somewhat that student was not asked to integrate some concepts he had learned earlier, such as database design and HTML. If I were to rework these assignment, I would require an integration: in assignment one, student would have to build a basic data driven web application with management tool in Java Swing stand-alone application (or applet) and assignment two would require adding greater interactivity for the management tool. Frankly, I believe that student should be equipped with web development skills as he will be most likely expected to create data driven web applications and mobile applications as his first assignment in his first job.

Unrelatedly, it is unfortunate that there is no option to pause for a year without incurring full on-going registration fee. While this may be common practice, I find it odd that if a client does not consume any services from a provider for a year and it costs provider of services no more than one envelope sent to charge full amount. I would understand that there would be say 50 handling fee for sending on-going registration form, but charging full amount seems to be excessive. I understand that in UK 250 is not a lot of money, but as your students are

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international and from economies with lesser purchasing power, it would be only fair to them not to charge full on-going registration fee if they wish not study this year. Should you wish so, I would be delighted to meet you in person and discuss any of the topics touched in my letter.

Yours faithfully

Konrads Smelkovs 5/30/2011

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