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From: tlh@mordred.cs.purdue.edu (Thomas L. Hausmann)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: Resources and education
Message-ID: <1345@arthur.cs.purdue.edu>
Date: Sat, 2-May-87 18:19:13 EDT
Article-I.D.: arthur.1345
Posted: Sat May  2 18:19:13 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 3-May-87 09:11:31 EDT
References: <1262@arthur.cs.purdue.edu> <801@killer.UUCP>
Sender: news@arthur.cs.purdue.edu
Organization: Department of Computer Science, Purdue University
Lines: 50
Summary: Response to Eric.



>in article <1262@arthur.cs.purdue.edu>, tlh@mordred.cs.purdue.edu (Thomas L. Hausmann) says:
>> In article <780@killer.UUCP>, elg@killer.UUCP (Eric Green) writes:
>>> I'm curious: What do you academicians ...
>>   ...In short, looking  up solutions (in my book) 
>>   is not cheating but it is circumventing the purpose of assignments.
>
>Isn't TELLING them about bubble sorts and quicksort, the same as them looking
>it up in a book in the library? 

  No, it isn't.  Refer to the quicksort algorithm on p 94 of AHU.  This is how
  I specified the quicksort algorithm to my class. The algorithm is short and
  easily stated, but when you implement quicksort you have to Micky-Mouse
  around to perform the partitioning.   Now IF I were to assign a program like
  this, one of the things the student would get out of the assignment is that
  easily stated algorithms often mask cumbersome implementation details.

>                                I don't know about you, but my instructor
>spent 2 lectures disecting the quicksort algorithm, line by line, and then
>gave us a programming assignment telling us to devise several ways of choosing
>a median value, and see how much time kicking in an insertion sort on small
>partition sizes would save, and print out performance data to see which was
>more efficient... seems to be the same kind of stuff that anything you can
>look up in the library would do, 
 
  Perhaps your instructor wanted you to look at a large amount of data
  and make a few guesses and then run your program on a few more times or
  verify your guesses mathematically.  Okay, so it's been done for
  quicksort, but down the road Eric, your going to have to be able to
  look back at your programs and find ways of making them more efficient
  and quite possibly this was one of the goals of the assignment.

>          ... students are supposed to be illiterate, and are supposed to do
>no outside work, and are supposed to learn only what's taught in class, seems
>to be the message. 

    This is obviously not the case.  Being able to use references is a good
    skill, sometimes it's more instructive to figure things out for yourself.

>Eric

Tom

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Thomas L. Hausmann           |   
Graduate Assistant           |   tlh@mordred.cs.purdue.edu    ( ARPA )
Dept of Computer Science     |
Purdue University            |   ...!purdue!tlh   ( UUCP  )
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