Short feedback for freecodecamp's beta stage

Hey, i’m doing FCC’s beta, i’m almost done with the first and second certificates, and while the curriculum is excellent the project test suite seems like an odd choice. It feels much more like a constraint rather than a guideline, it heavily constrains creativity and incentivises doing the bare minimum to meet the checkmarks. That’s how i felt, of course i can’t talk for others.

After doing the survey and tribute page following the guidelines 100%, i decided to just ignore them completely for the landing page and subsequent projects. I’m trying to do the projects without even taking a look at the test suite, and afterwards, when the beta version goes live, i’ll adapt them only to pass the test suite, and that’s where i see a problem. The suite ends up serving no purpose other than as a checklist, let’s say i forgot to add a semantic html5 tag, i would surely add it to pass the test, but that wouldn’t be a meaningful feedback, only a small hastle in getting my marks checked, in no way would i take it into account in my next projects.

If the reason behind the test suite is to automate the process of giving certificates, then i see it’s purpose and agree with it completely. But for learning purposes, i can’t see a positive side to it.

Of course, this is a highly subjective opinion from my experience doing the beta projects and in no way i’m a reflex of the community as a whole.

I agree with you on this one. I have done a couple of the projects myself and I felt frustrated because some of the projects did not turnout how I wanted due to the constraints. I had this issue on my product landing page, I couldn’t do things like make the navbar direct you to slightly above the section so you could see the whole thing because the user story required it to be in the section. I feel like the testable user stories are good in some aspect but they need to be cut back a lot. There are some of the stories that just pull back too much on the creative side of things, especially because these projects are supposed to be building a portfolio. The new beta as a whole is great though, I feel like its layout is way better and it goes into more detail on topics that I felt lost on on the original site. I can’t wait for it to actually be released.