[Launch School] We're Splitting RB101/RB109 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 RB101/RB109 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 RB101 into two smaller courses: RB101 and RB110. Each course will have its own assessment courses as well: RB109 and RB119. We will be deprecating the existing RB101 and RB109 courses and calling them RB101d and RB109d. RB101d will be replaced with the new RB101 and RB110 courses, while RB109d will be replaced with new RB109 and RB119 assessment courses. Notably, there will be 4 assessments in total. The new RB101 will consist of the first 3 lessons from the deprecated RB101d course, while RB110 will consist of the final 3 lessons from RB101d. 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 RB109 interview will be very similar to the new RB109 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 RB119 interview will be identical to the current RB109 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 RB109 interview will provide a taste of the interview experience before going into the RB119 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 RB109 (soon to be RB109d), regardless of whether you passed, you must complete the old assessments in RB109d. - If you have already enrolled in the current RB101 course, but haven't taken any assessments, you have the choice of finishing up with RB101d and RB109d or of switching over to the new courses. - If you haven't enrolled in the current RB101 by January 17th, you must take the new RB101/RB109/RB110/RB119 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](