Friday, August 22, 2008

Midterm madness

Jess, Thomas, and I proctored the midterms for CS 21 A sections C and D.

The moment I walked into the room, the classes let out a collective cry. It's the sort of high emotion that terror teachers find intoxicating (or so I've heard...)

Anyway, as the papers were being handed in, I was dismayed that some people overthought what we considered to be giveaway questions. For example: Given the code

public class Hello
{
//the usual "hello world!" code
}

the question was TRUE or FALSE: the code has to be saved in a file with name Hello.java.

A lot of people answered FALSE.

A follow up TRUE or FALSE question was: for a run-time error to occur, a program must first compile successfully.

Once again, a lot of people answered FALSE.

We have failed...