She's the quintessence of making the grade

[austin_dern]

One question on the midterms I gave out yesterday was to identify and fix all the errors in a block of code. It was surprisingly hard to write deliberately buggy code; all that came ``naturally'' was = where == was meant. I had to go back and re-bug the fragment.

One bug was switching the capitalization (to which C is sensitive; touchy, even) of two variables. A student asked if that was an unintentional typo. Repeatedly. He wanted to be sure it was a mistake-he-was-meant-to-find before listing it. Maybe it's because I never took a programming class, and never took grades or exams all that seriously, but I can't understand why he thought it worth trying to get an answer other than, ``If it's something which will make the code not do the desired task, then list it'' out of me. Did he think we'd mark him off if he picked out an error we hadn't meant to include?

So far, about two-thirds graded, nobody's gotten fewer than four of the eight true/false questions right. I'm curious whether anyone will do worse than random guessing.

Also I ran out of Rejuvenating Effects Crest, which was really tasty. My teeth will have to stop cross-dressing.

Trivia: George Mortimer Pullman and Leonard Seibert built the first Pullman railroad car without blueprints or drawn plans; they worked to Pullman's intuition. Source: The Story of American Railroads, Stewart H. Holbrook.

Currently Reading: Chariots for Apollo, Charles R. Pellegrino and Joshua Stoff.

Comments

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

It's amazing what people ask me during exams. In logic class, what usually happens is that someone doesn't even know what the question is asking for because they haven't been paying enough attention, so they try to ask me what to do. On the most recent one, for example, there was a problem that said, "Give a counterexample for the following argument." Someone asks, "Does that mean I'm supposed to... ? [fill in mostly wrong idea of what a counterexample is]." It's as though she thought that I couldn't tell her the answer, but I could tell her how to get the answer. Another problem said, "Criticize the following premises using one of the appropriate methods." I talked about three methods in class (and they were also in the textbook). A guy asks, "What am I supposed to do for this one? Am I supposed to write something out?" And the thing is, whenever I have to tell people that I can't give them an answer, they look offended. What were they expecting?

My favorite example was the guy in my logic class last summer who asked, in regard to being asked to criticize a conceptual theory (definition), asked, "Am I supposed to come up with something that doesn't fit one of the conditions, or all of the conditions?" I said, "I can't tell you." He said, "But I didn't understand when you said it in lecture."

Er, yes. The exam is a bad time to complain that you didn't understand something in the lecture.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure how I avoided people asking ``how do I do this problem?'' in this exam, considering the number of students. The oddest question that I got was from a student who was turning in her paper, about two minutes before the Final End of the Exam And We Mean It; she wanted to know if it was all right to turn in stuff in pencil, rather than pen. I don't know what she would have done had I said ``no''. (I can't bring myself to care whether they write in pen or pencil, though I admit the greater chance of retroactive cheating with pencil.)

Generally I think my students are slightly more prone to freakishness than U.S. students are. The thing that gets me is the high fraction of students who will use rulers to carefully draw out precise boxes around stuff that doesn't need precise boxes, like the highlighting of one's final answer. That and the liberal application of white-out bars to erase any hint of work-in-progress-but-rejected. (Always a mistake, in exams, in my judgement; but then I give credit if the right answer was scratched out and the wrong one written later.)

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

what's this?
..you're teeth will have to brush with salad dressing..?? :9

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Last time I was in the U.S., I bought toothpaste. The brand I got, I'm told by bunny_hugger, is women's toothpaste. Since I assume my teeth to be male, this means they had to be cross-dressing. For me, this is normal.