I just wanted to clarify one point about Collaborative Virtual Environment's students and our "griping". Our course is a small, rather specialized design degree. This particular course (Collaborative Virtual Environments) sounded promising in the overview. However this subject's content is rather redundant to us, and it seems that (this may be rather cynical), like a another subject we took last year, it is being run simply to justify research money . I won't go into specifics, but most of the technologies we're learning about are 5+ years old and many of us use quite prolifically, for example, we spent a whole week on the different functions of msn messenger, which i personally have been using since i was 10! This seems redundant as our degree is basically about learning new design technologies. This sort of thing has left me and the rest of my class feeling rather disillusioned with Collaborative Virtual Environments.
The incident that ycha5217 described was the proverbial last straw for many of us. Up until this point we had whined and complained about the subject amongst ourselves, but just got on with it. However as we're approaching the last 4 weeks of semester and assessments are starting to pile up (many of us are doing animation, important to many of our career goals, where a lot of time is needed), to have a tutor stand up in front of the class and tell us that we had to put so much time and effort in to something that half of us wouldn't even pass was... well that was it.
So just to clarify. The DesComp students studying Collaborative Virtual Environments have been rather good sports about it (especially since we're paying $900 to do this subject, others more, I moved from North Queensland to do this degree), until now, where we have been intentionally pitted against each other to secure marks for this pointless subject.