/digipen/ - DigiPenitentiary

>>925
>For anyone who wasn't there, at least four people burst into tears and more than 60% of the BFA's are suicidal or depressed because of Digipen.

Was this an anonymous poll or something? How was this information given?

This sounds pretty fucking unignorable. The school can't ignore something this ridiculous.

>>926
Here's the way the town meeting worked. There were no teachers there, only department chair heads and the student service people. First ten minutes of the meeting was the chair heads telling us all the stuff they're going to improve, many of which are, to their credit, legit improvements; more integration with other degrees, lightening courseload, and shaving some fucking credit hours off to make people's lives less of a living hell.

After that, Q and A was opened up and a shitload of people got to name specific teachers they were having problems with and specific grievances they had. Pretty much everyone has had some kind of unprofessional encounter with a specific teacher at some point and many have had serious health problems because of the late policy (40% off for late assignment) and grading policy. One person talked about ignoring pneumonia symptoms to turn in an assignment and learning at the ER that if their brain had gotten any hotter they would have suffered neurological damage. Several people have completely stopped trusting administration or teachers due to their inability to respect disability measures and repeated condescension and singling out towards students of disabilities.

After that the chair heads left and everyone got to talk about the more serious problems to student affairs, who seemed pretty appalled that the entire BFA is having a collective mental breakdown and they didn't know about the half of it (even though people have been bringing up certain teachers and writing honest course evaluations for years; none of this has been kept from them and many people have been outspoken about this for a long time).

So main issues were mental health (big one) the poorly managed curriculum, technical issues like drivers never fucking working, BAGD's and Programmers stealing chairs from the artist's area of Edison for their own use, etc…
imo Digipen admin need to stop living in denial and realize that they can't keep riding on Portal and lies about the integration of game teams in the BFA curriculum. They have burned a huge amount of people and created a degree full of cynics who will not recommend this school to anyone and believe this degree is irreparable. Drastic changes need to be made and lip service has to stop NOW.

So yeah, that's how the meeting went.

>>928
>One person talked about ignoring pneumonia symptoms to turn in an assignment and learning at the ER that if their brain had gotten any hotter they would have suffered neurological damage.

Holy fucking shit.

here's the compiled notes from the meeting. http://pastebin.com/Qz0GsdhY
….yeahhhh. Not good.

>>941

Who took the notes? Are they available for the other townhalls as well?

>>944
A student took the notes, they may have been a representative but I don't know. And know, unless the other meetings had a scribe taking notes.

>>945
*no not 'know'

Mental health in all programs is an issue, particularly in BAGD and BFA programs, who are both overworked and undervalued.

The "psychologists" are not useless, however. Anything that's told to them is in confidence, and they are not allowed to talk about it outside that room unless a person presents a clear danger to themselves or someone else.

I've been seeing Kay for over a year, and it's done me a lot of good. The bigger issue is that there are over 1000 students at this school, and most should be seeing therapists on a regular basis. Their schedules are always full, and the school has restrictions on them that make them virtually ineffectual.

If I were seriously contemplating suicide (which I have in the past), it would take me more than a week to get in for an appointment. That's unacceptable.

>>1039
Maybe GAT's still not a picnic even when you don't have real classes like a BSGD. You never know.

If BAGDs are overworked, pretty much every degree is overworked. Putting BAGDs and BFAs on the same level of workload is a fucking insult to BFAs. But no, we don't need to derail a thread where we shit talk BAGDs since we can just post in the other thread. We can however correct somebody for coming across as delusional.

Your ass: it's not a hat. Use appropriately.
Feel free to continue this and contribute to the aforementioned derailing.

Back on topic: I just read the pastebin notes on the town hall. Omg, what the fuck is going on with that degree? That's such bullshit! I know that students shouldn't be babied in college but still, a teacher telling a student to drop out due to criticism is APPALLING.

Every degree IS overworked (minus sound designers, sorry). Terrible BFAs and BAGDs can still get away with quite little, but they won't get far (read never graduate)

If I may chirp in, as a BFA myself, I can't remember the last time I was able to pay off a TA or sleep with somebody to let them do my assignment. Yet, apparently for some reason, all of my other friends have managed to do it on more than one occasion in their respective degrees. I wish I could fuck the shit out of somebody to have them do my projects but any sane BFA knows that they'll be insuring that they never pass their own classes as a result.

You other degrees have it so easy.

>>1231
I've seen BFA girls get away with that bullshit, and have never met anyone in RTIS or BSGD who has been able to fuck their way through a class. I guess we just keep different company.

>>1231
Near the end of my stay at DP I heard an alarming number of my RTIS and BSGD friends talk about signing each other in for classes, trading homework, just not going to over half of their classes with 0 repercussions, and just failing assignments and talking their way out of it later.

I was amazed, because I thought that the strict zero-tolerance policy for BFAs failing one assignment or dropping a letter grade for every unexcused absence applied to everyone. It's like the administration is specifically trying to fuck over artists as hard as possible, for no reason.

>>1210
This.
Having taken both BFA and BAGD classes, I can confidently say that BFA's have at least twice the workload of BAGD's.

Once you finish a GAT project it's usually done for good. Almost every BFA assignment isn't done until you resubmit.

How to get an A in a BAGD class: Bullshit. Everything.

How to get an A B in a BFA class: Git Gud.

>>1245
You didn't know about people signing for each other on the attendance sheets? Those are only there for accreditation purposes.

And usually(as far as I'm aware) the trading homework is just to understand how someone else is approaching an assignment problem.

>>1245
Also took some BFA classes (BAGD here), I was wondering about this policy because I remember doing a good job on the main deliverables for one class but thought I missed one of the busy work assignments. Ended up getting an A or a B overall so I wondered if some of the teachers just ignored the letter of the policy if the main learning objective was fulfilled.

>>1246
GAT resubmissions happen but they're usually for a fraction of the class, and are reserved for bigger fuckups on one of 3 or 4 larger projects over the course whereas the way I saw it handled in BFA courses was that it occurred weekly and was built into the grading process as a rule rather than an option. With the GAT classes the critique and revision process is still there in a sense, but it happens in the form of playtesting labs and designers are expected to hash that out before the big submission, which is why resubmitting a GAT project is usually for students that fucked up and didn't test enough or weren't prepared for labs.

One last thing, this is kind of anecdotal but I noticed the difference in the iteration process for the programs in one of the BFA classes; an early assignment had a bunch of specific file name and format requirements along with some other small details. Most of the class submitted the assignment with the wrong name or format or some other small error which was pretty much the sole focus of the crit session. I didn't really have to change anything because prior GAT/CS classes had conditioned me by this point to be super anal about rubric requirements and filenames before submitting (anyone who's had a pondsmith curriculum will know what I mean). My post-crit revisions in that class ranged from a few hours to a few minutes, or sometimes not even necessary. Not pointing this out to shit on the BFAs, just noticed how differently grading process is handled for them.

>>1231
I find your statement confusing…more than 80% of the people in the school are male, and most of the rest is in the BFA program. When you're the only female in a class of 20 people, there's a much higher chance that you could find someone to sleep with to gain special favor.

>>1267
The 1 assignment failure policy only applies to BFAs. Since you were BAGD you were exempt.

Well if they made the BAGD program as hard as the BFA they would lose a lot of profits

>>1321
If they made the BAGD program as hard as the BFA program, we'd have a lot less annoying students.

>>1322 implying they care about that

>>1323
I'm implying I care about that.