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Comment by bitcartel | Hacker News Reader

"In a programming course, it’s exceedingly difficult to judge one’s knowledge of a subject by a written 50 minute exam. It ends up being a test on nit-picky details and doesn’t accurately determine the good programmers from the great, or the not so great." -- Student

Whereas of course boycotting an exam reveals so much more about one's programming knowledge!

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[Edit: my comment was in reply to a sentence in the parent comment which has since been removed.]

There's nothing they "got away with".

  “In my courses, all grades are relative to the highest actually
   achieved score. Thus, if no one showed up and everyone got 0
   percent, everyone would be marked as 100 percent,” Froehlich
   wrote.

The students took advantage of a stated policy and received the promised result of that policy. It's game theory, and they played by the game's rules fair and square.

Yes, but it does seem like the students were cheeky and got away with it. They played the game according to the rules, but there is the issue of gentlemanly conduct.

I got the impression that the professor had anticipated this as a possible outcome, and was intentionally challenging the students to overcome the coordination problem, as he didn't think they'd be able.

I think the question hinges on whether or not it was an intended consequence. The professor said:

  “I had decided that I am sticking to my policy, they had
   decided to boycott the exam, and that was pretty much it,”
   Froelich wrote. “The students learned that by coming
   together, they can achieve something that individually they
   could never have done.”

This seems to indicate he approves. Though now that the previously theoretical concept has been proven, he has changed the rules so that if everyone gets 0 points, then everyone ends up with 0 percent too.

There is something more important that the students learned by organizing themselves this way: that they are not each other's enemies. I am sure a few students received high marks that they did not deserve as a result, but I suspect that would have been the case even had the students taken the exam (judging by what I saw as a TA in my first year of grad school).

The professor now offers students a choice between an exam and a project, and the students voted for a project. The project is a better way to measure their aptitude. On the whole, I think this was positive for all involved.

> that they are not each other's enemies.

If only. Highschool was - to put it mildly - a sequence of bullies trying to get away with the absolute minimum and being enemy to quite a few of the other students. Never quite enough that they could muster a response. I've never seen such enmity in adults in any workplace as I've seen in schools.

The professor should/could have simply told them to get in and do the exam or face zero marks. No doubt there would have been howls of protest from the students, however this would have resulted in a test of their character and subsequent life lessons in unity, division, authority and fairness.

It sounds like they were just introductory courses. If they didn't learn anything they'll soon be weeded out by more advanced CS classes.

Ugh. Having been in those more advanced CS classes, quite often the biggest problem they have involves the pile of students who supposedly passed the prerequisites but don't actually know the material. Unless you have a professor willing to just let those people fail or study outside of class, the class ends up cramming in piles of remedial material and discussions to get everyone to the same baseline.

Good spot. You have to separate the wheat from the chaff at some point. Better earlier than later.

Exactly. I knew several people in my introductory CS courses who couldn't, say, describe a linked list. There is room for testing basic concepts at courses of this level.

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