The wrong version and bad answers

I am a few weeks into a class at UCI Extension. It is about programming for a specific processor chip. Most of the work so far is writing code in an application and then uploading that code to a circuit board.

There are some big problems with the class. The textbook and the lecture notes use version 3 of the software. Almost everyone in the class and me are using version 4. There have been significant changes between the two versions. Entire menus do not exist in the new version and many settings have been relocated, renamed, or removed entirely.

The programs are not working for me. It is annoying and I have not been able to complete many of the assignments.

Everyone uploads their code online after they finish the projects. However, even after using the exact same code as other people and reading their write ups which include how they solved every problem that came up I still cannot get many of the examples to work for me.

Last week the class was going so poorly, I was filled with excitement when I saw the next section involved z transforms and transfer functions. From my previous class I despise z transforms and transfer functions greatly.

Yesterday I finished a quiz for the class. I had to answer three questions from the textbook and enter the answers online. There were two big problems. First, it took me a while to understand what the questions wanted and how to do it. They involved transfer functions, an impulse function, and many mistakes on my part. Even after I read the sections in the textbook, looked at another textbook from an earlier class that covered this, and looked at a couple of websites I could not figure it out. As a last resort, I typed a form of the problem into Google. The first result that came up explained everything perfectly. I was able to finish the quiz and submit it with only seconds to spare (as the 1 minute 14 seconds timer indicates).

My second problem was the choices the instructor gave for answers. He could have set the answer choices to any numbers or words he wanted. Somehow he managed to give 21 possible answers which included two that were equally valid. For one problem I calculated an answer of 1.1. Click on the cropped screen shot below and tell me, what am I supposed to do?



Twice during the quiz the answer was exactly between two values.

I will see how the class continues and finishes up. Right now it is not looking promising.