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Path: utzoo!watmath!wateng!clelau
From: clelau@wateng.UUCP (Eric C.L. Lau)
Newsgroups: net.cse
Subject: Exams vs. Programming Assignments
Message-ID: <2818@wateng.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 22-Sep-85 23:02:48 EDT
Article-I.D.: wateng.2818
Posted: Sun Sep 22 23:02:48 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 23-Sep-85 02:58:20 EDT
References: <433@uvm-cs.UUCP> <236@uwai.UUCP> <1627@ihuxl.UUCP> <7@ubc-cs.UUCP> <659@bu-cs.UUCP>
Reply-To: clelau@wateng.UUCP (Eric C.L. Lau)
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 39
Summary: 

This was in the discussion of students cheating in programming assignments.
In article <659@bu-cs.UUCP> root@bu-cs.UUCP (Barry Shein) writes:
>I use a simple check, a student can not pass most of my classes without
>satisfactory grades on exams. Exams are closed book and I make it quite
>clear (and design the questions such) that the primary purpose of my
>exams is to put the person who is getting too much help on the homeworks

I guess I'll throw in my two bits.  I'll assume this is a CS course you're
talking about and that the kind of exam you're referring to is one where the
students have to write programs or program segments to do specific tasks.  If
my assumptions are wrong then don't take this article wrong.  But
my complaint about exams that ask you to write a function that do this or that
is that they don't really test whether you can program.  They test how fast
you can think up an algorithm.  In real life you don't normally have a twenty
minute time limit to write a function.  The pressure itself is not normal.
I know in real life there are dates when projects are due but these due dates
usually allow alot more than twenty minutes for a working function.  And they
also allow testing and correcting a function with a bug in it.  That is how
programming is normally done.  Having twenty minutes to write a syntactically
and logically correct function will pick out the best students true but it
leaves the average programmers in with the hopeless ones.
I've survived all this and made it to grad school because I happen to think
fairly fast but I have friends who I consider better programmers than I who
didn't make the grades because they couldn't do well on the exams.  Their
projects and assignments were better than mine because they put the extra effort
into them but they couldn't work under the twenty-minute-per-function time
limit.  Sure they passed the courses but I got higher marks because I could
think faster, that's all.
Before someone brings it up, I know that it's possible to make up a "good"
exam with adequate time limits and not too complex objectives for the functions
to be written.  It's just that I haven't written too many and I'm pretty sure
they're not easy to make up.
Well I'm open to profs out there with comments since I'm just a lowly grad
student :-)
		Eric Lau
		...!ihnp4!watmath!wateng!clelau

P.S. The twenty minute figure is not based on any facts just from my past
experience.


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