Hacker News Reader

Comment by materielle | Hacker News Reader

As recently as 2015 when I attended a middling CS program, we had in-person timed exams where we had to write down DSA implementations on a blank sheet of paper in Java.

We were deducted points for trivial syntax mistakes.

If these stories I keep hearing are true, then university programs have really taken a nose dive recently. This isn’t a “back in my day” thing, but within the past 5 years.

The pace of the purported decline makes me question if some of these stories are sensationalist. But I don’t know, I keep hearing about them.

View on HN

I'm not sure I understand your comment. Surely you don't think that the details of a particular programming language's syntax are an appropriate criteria for grading an exam? That seems crazy.

Sounds fair to me so long as students were aware going into the test that syntax would be graded

Fairness or lack thereof is not the point. Programming language syntax is trade school stuff. And I don't mean that as a slight against trade schools, but it's a different type of training.

Rethink it in written language:

> Surely you don't think that the details of a particular written language's syntax are an appropriate criteria for grading an exam?

Computer science is the science of computing. Programming languages are the language used to implement computer science. Therefore you would expect that students accurately use the programming language to answer questions about computing. Seems reasonable to me.

You don't need programming languages to implement computer science. Pseudo code suffices for exams.

You don't need programming languages to DESCRIBE computer science but to implement it you need some programming language.

Quite literally an "implementation detail."

If instructors are testing implementation details on paper exams then they're really missing the point of CS education. Completely lazy and incompetent, should be terminated.

It's a balancing act.

Some portion of computer science education needs to be practical (implementation details), while some portion needs to be pure computer science (pseudo code).

Obviously projects are a good way to measure implementation details, but they are too easily cheated. Every class I took had exams as 80% or more of the grade. Not every class expected accurate syntax on exams, but most expected code rather than pseudo code (typically C).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com