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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Generally if you can pull that off you are way past the course material :-) I had a FORTRAN problem which asked to print the current bowling score given a series of numbers between 0 and 10 (number of pins knocked down) and I had it print out spares as '/' and strikes as 'X' and it didn't print the actual score until you didn't get a strike (as is the custom on bowling.) and the TA complained. (the assignment was to print out the score every frame) but the professor was cool about it and had a nice chuckle so I did get full marks.

It is generally a sign of how good the faculty are at an institution based on how they respond to this sort of exceptionalism.

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In college, I had to take a 1-credit hour lab course on MS-Office so that I could take an accounting class I wanted.

The first lab featured a typing test app where you had to be able to type 40wpm or they made you drop the class. The app was a DOS app that a) made you type a certain bit of unchanging text every time for the test, and if you finished it type it again until you made a certain number of mistakes.

I wrote a borland basic TSR that pretended to be a keyboard, and typed in the corpus repeatedly.

The instructor apologized repeatedly for making me take the class, and looked utterly terrified of me for the rest of the semester after receiving my 300,000wpm test result.

You got off lightly there, the instructor could have made you his assistant and farm out typing up all the course notes. At that speed that shouldn't have taken more than a few minutes of your time ;)

...did you happen to go to NC State? Just wondering if you took the same class I was supposed to take (placed out after a night of cramming on excel, having never used it before)

Back in 2nd year CS we were tasked with making a simple terminal minesweeper game. It would print the whole board state after each move and read coords from stdin to know what square was picked.

I wanted to make it a proper GUI-style board with arrow key movement, randomised mines (the assignment tasked us with reading mine locations from stdin at the start), auto-expanding zeros, varying board sizes...so I did.

However, I knew the assignment would be marked on automated test results. I wanted to show off, but still pass the auto-tests. So I made it ask for game "mode" at the start, implementing both the requested behavior and my desired behavior. But if stdin wasn't a tty, it just did the requested behaviour without asking, thus foiling the tests.

I had a similar experience with a Visual Basic class at community college (required credit for the degree at the time). Since the class was kind of boring (was already a C programmer, Basic was way in my past at that point), I wanted to make the projects more interesting. So, on a calculator project, we were to make a hand-held calculator emulator. I asked if there were any restrictions on the type of calculator, and was told no -- any one. So I emulated an HP RPN style calculator. But since the instructor never heard of RPN before, and despite an introduction screen explaining it, he still failed the assignment.

It baffles me that there are college-level CS instructors who haven't heard of RPN before -- my high school CS teacher had us write an RPN calculator.

That said, I can see an argument that an RPN calculator "trivializes" the assignment compared to an infix calculator, especially if the latter was supposed to do order-of-operations.

That's the kicker -- order of operations wasn't a requirement (and probably wouldn't have been allowed) either. Maybe I should have put a mode button on it so that you can select the desired mode.

But that experience did teach me a valuable lesson -- always follow the specifications as close as possible, don't try to innovate (unless working on your own projects). And, I've learned to spot (and explain) contradictory / intractable specifications up front.

In a way it is a pity that that was your take home lesson. You deserved an A++ and the take home should have been that going the extra mile gets rewarded.

I did have a couple other classes that were a bit better -- Assembly (BAL on an IBM Mainframe), in which the instructor presented an award to me at the end of the semester, my very own pocket protector. And a C class I took, had a similar calculator project, so I ended up doing a parse tree with recursive evaluation in order to do handle operator precedence and parentheses. In that class, the instructor made handouts out of my homework assignment to go over as an example of good programming technique and an intro to algorithms for the rest of the class. Made me feel special at the time.

Yet, in CS courses it doesn't. An A+ means you passed all of the automated tests.

I've been a senior developer for almost a decade now. I've never heard of RPN. Not everyone took the same classes you did, get off your high-horse.

You could certainly be a software developer, and a reasonably competent one, without having heard of RPN. I would argue that it's harder to be a computer scientist---and shocking to manage to get to the PhD level in computer science---without having at least a little exposure to RPN: it's a classic example of stack manipulation and has important theoretical relevance to programming language theory and compiler design.

While it is true that for every thing that anyone says "everyone knows" at any given time in the world, 250 people are being born every minute on average. I think you know where I'm going... those people don't know anything, so it's clear that some much larger fraction of the general population don't know that thing.

I am personally doubly surprised as GP to find two people in a discussion about Computer Science at a college level that have not heard of RPN before. For what it's worth!

Does the expansion of the initialisation help? Reverse Polish Notation.

He was talking about college level CS instructors, not about developers, senior or otherwise.

If you have taken engineering at a college level you probably least bumped into a handheld HP calculator at least once.

If you have taken an introduction to the Unix/Linux shell, you most probably saw the dc command.

I took an exam which presented a drawing of a logic chip and a description of its pins and asked us to implement some functionality using this chip plus the minimum number of external gates.

I managed to implement it using only wires, with no extra gates at all. Apparently this surprised the instructors; the best known solution used two extra gates. They gave full marks to me, but also to the many students who used two gates. Given that the exam was designed to not have anyone answer everything correctly in the time allotted and was graded on a curve, I found this distasteful: I had devoted extra time to finding the optimal solution, at the expense of spending more time on other parts of the exam. The instructors were not sympathetic, and I got a B on the exam despite teaching them something new.

> I found this distasteful: I had devoted extra time to finding the optimal solution, at the expense of spending more time on other parts of the exam

Sounds like a good lesson for someone graduating into the workforce ;)

Can you find the original problem? That sounds intriguing!

I think it's lost to time, unfortunately.

That's the kind of thing I tend to reference when talking to students and prospective students about what they should get out of college outside of classes. There is a grade above A+: it's "hey, I've got this project you might be interested in".

I was taking a beginner Java class (had to use up that GI Bill), and the final assignment was to make a simple "gas pump" program that tallied up the total price and printed a receipt.

I wrote up a pretty simple implementation and realized I had 50 minutes left to sit around, so I started refactoring it into classes and writing unit tests. I was pretty happy with the result, but I turned in both versions just in case I would get docked for not following the instructions exactly.

Got a B. Other people in the class who did a straight imperative style got As.

This is what computer science instruction is like at a for-profit college.

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