[Launch School] We're Splitting JS101/JS109 into Two Courses! (January 17th)

Hello everybody. Happy New Year! This is going to be an exciting year at Launch School, with a number of improvements on their way in Core. Our first significant change will be happening on January 17th. Over time, we've observed that the JS101/JS109 courses are the hardest courses in Core, often taking students months to complete. Preparing for the assessments is also a major chore -- there is just so much material, it's hard to know when you're ready for the assessment. To help alleviate these issues, we are splitting JS101 into two smaller courses: JS101 and JS110. Each course will have its own assessment courses as well: JS109 and JS119. We will be deprecating the existing JS101 and JS109 courses and calling them JS101d and JS109d. JS101d will be replaced with the new JS101 and JS110 courses, while JS109d will be replaced with new JS109 and JS119 assessment courses. Notably, there will be 4 assessments in total. The new JS101 will consist of the first 3 lessons from the deprecated JS101d course, while JS110 will consist of the final 3 lessons from JS101d. In both assessment courses, there will be an exam and an interview. The exams will be very similar to the existing exams, but there will only be about half as many questions in each exam and they will have shorter time limits. The JS109 interview will be very similar to the new JS109 exam -- we'll be asking you to verbally answer questions that are very similar to the exam questions. This will be a short interview lasting about 30 minutes. The JS119 interview will be identical to the current JS109 interview: you'll have to solve two programming problems in a one hour interview. We expect that this new structure will make it easier for students to study the material and reduce the pressure of preparing for the exams. The shorter exams means that students can focus their study time, and the new JS109 interview will provide a taste of the interview experience before going into the JS119 coding interview. Here's a brief outline of how these changes will affect your path through the beginning of Core: - If you have already taken the first assessment from the current JS109 (soon to be JS109d), regardless of whether you passed, you must complete the old assessments in JS109d. - If you have already enrolled in the current JS101 course, but haven't taken any assessments, you have the choice of finishing up with JS101d and JS109d or of switching over to the new courses. - If you haven't enrolled in the current JS101 by January 17th, you must take the new JS101/JS109/JS110/JS119 courses. Feel free to ask questions here; if we can, we'll answer them. --------------------------------------------------------------- If you wish to stop receiving emails from us, you can use the one-click link below to unsubscribe. [Unsubscribe From All Email]( [Unsubscribe From Weekly Summaries](