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From: beth@umcp-cs.UUCP (Beth Katz)
Newsgroups: net.cse
Subject: Re: working programs
Message-ID: <244@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 13-Mar-86 10:45:18 EST
Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.244
Posted: Thu Mar 13 10:45:18 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 15-Mar-86 19:54:46 EST
References: <9431@ritcv.UUCP>
Reply-To: beth@maryland.UUCP (Beth Katz)
Organization: U of Maryland, Computer Science Dept., College Park, MD
Lines: 49

jeff writes:
>This article has to do with working programs in CS courses.  In my past 
>experience with CS courses it seems that alot of u-grads do not get their
>programs done correctly.  This, of course is very common, but when the
>the grades came back, i have been quite suprised.
>
I'm new at teaching, but I knew a lot of students would be turning in
programs that didn't work perfectly.  What I didn't know was that only
four programs out of 29 would pass my tests.  Obviously, the programs
weren't the only thing that was wrong. :-)  I thought about it, decided
that perhaps the students were not comfortable with the language (Ada),
the operating system (UNIX), the editor (vi), the time to finish the
problem (1.5 weeks), the specs for the changes (they were modifying
some programs), or some combination of those.  I decided to describe the
failures and ask them to fix them.  I hope that's a better learning
experience. The class has both grads and undergrads.

A friend and I have contemplated giving 0/1 grades on programs.  Students
often change the problem to suit their solution or decide that partial
credit is enough.  We definitely want to encourage good programming
style, but we want programs that work.  For example, my students were
unhappy with the commenting and style of some the programs they were
changing.  In most classes, these programs would have earned fairly
reasonable marks for style.  I hope that when the students write their
own programs, they will remember this assignment and comment more
effectively.  But having a program work is also very important.  Sometimes
I just think we've gone overboard in stressing style over correctness.

The 0/1 grading has problems, but when I was an undergrad (at William and
Mary), one professor was so annoyed that most of the class couldn't
answer a question about BNF on a midterm that he gave us a project.
We had to write a SNOBOL program (if I remember correctly) to read
in a BNF grammar and generate a recognizer for the language described
by the grammar.  Our grade on the program (0 or 1) would be multiplied
by our final grade.  EVERYONE managed to get that program to work.
And I would bet every one of us remembers at least something about BNF,
if not SNOBOL.

Maybe having students fix the faults in their programs would be good
for them.  Maybe stressing the need to develop test cases (input and
output) and checking the program before turning it in would help. 
Maybe writing better specifiactions would help.  But giving the majority
of the credit for style doesn't seem to be the answer.

				Beth Katz
				Univ. of Maryland C S Dept.
-- These opinions are my own.  This department surely wouldn't make --
-- me its spokesman.  Power and graduate students don't mix. :-)    --
-- This doesn't mean that "the-powers-that-be" don't listen to us.  --