Nerd Alert!
I probably should have mentioned this earlier but I require all posts to have the words listed in alphabetical order and to have a hyphen between each syllable and to have all punctuation (including the above-mentioned hyphens) in italic font. Being as nobody has followed this simple format, I’m afraid I’ll have to fail everyone in this thread including myself.
Similarly, I had a chem lab prof who inSISted that we turn in lab books only in pen, to prove that we’d not been fudging the data. If you make a mistake, cross it out and just admit it. That way you have a record.
Of course, if you jot notes off to the side, you can eventually calculate what measurements you need to have made to get your percent error within the full credit range. I swear, I didn’t really understand the math of the complicated equations until I had to see if my acid ml added needed to go up or down to create a good answer 6 steps later…
Too late; I refer you to post 11. See me after class, Mr. Nemo.
I want to thank everyone for reminding me again why I never went to graduate school…
I must, of course, refer people to a list of unusual answers to exam questions. (Warning: profanity!)
Yep - same GMI. It was General Motors Institute when I went there. I left just as it became GMI Engineering & Management Institute (where the GMI did not officially stand for anything). It later became (& still is) Kettering University.
I heard about Fast Eddie. I did not have him. I did however experience the test on day 1 of Calc 2 that covered everything that you were supposed to have learned in Calc 1. That was a trip.
Right - # Wrong = Final Score. My Organic Chem final was like that. It was supposed to prevent you from guessing at the answers (I guess).
We were suppsed to send in a map of what the concept “collection developement” meant to us in grad school. She asked, “what does CD look like to you?”.
I was so tempted to send in a diagram of the London Tube (or a one eyed, one eared flying purple people eater). I refrained. Kinda wish I hadn’t, now.
Love the exam answers!
I took (and then TAed/graded for several semesters) a Data Structures course in college in which it was not only possible to get a negative score on an assignment, it was possible (though difficult) to submit a completely functional program and still get a negative score.
The grading was as such:
Each program was run through a series of automated tests to check that it met the spec of the assignment. Passing all the tests gave you 100 points. Then the graders read the source. Part of the point of this class was to teach people to write well-designed easy-to-read code, not just something that works. So there were style guides and commenting guides and formatting consistency issues (no one really cared what formatting you used, you just had to be consistent and readable). We also looked for bugs that weren’t caught by the automated tests. All of these things subtracted points from your score.
Badly named variable? -1 point. Failed to initialize a pointer? -5 points. Misspelling in the comments? -2 points (to be fair, we used an open source spellchecker for this).
All of the penalties (and there were many more than I mentioned here) were detailed in the syllabus and on the website and mentioned in class several times and added specifically as grader comments in the code that was returned to the students. Even the spellchecker we used was made public.
But a few times a semester, someone would submit a barely working program that was written badly and would drop into the negatives. I never actually saw a program that passed all the tests and still got < 0, but it was possible according to the rubric.
I agreed with you, but turned out to be dead wrong. Although I didn’t get to discuss it with her, I had to ask for a regrade and she had left by the time the professor told me what I need to do for that.
Pick one you’re 100% sure of and just answer that one?
and get 1 out of 50 points?
Hmm, I read that differently than you, and wrongly I suspect.
That can’t be much of a detriment to guessing though if you don’t know much of them. You’d still need to guess to pass.
Hee. Number five looks like some of the answers I turned in in my 9th grade algebra class. Which I almost flunked. I had nightmares that my teacher was chasing me with a big cooking spoon and yelling, “FACTORING!! FACTORING!!”
Here it is almost 20 years later and I still haven’t figured out what factoring is or why I’d ever want to do it.
I really did flunk geometry the following year. The teacher kept trying to make me do proofs and wouldn’t accept “Because I said so!” as a valid response.
#7 had me laughing so hard I had tears in my eyes!
Please tell me you didn’t go on to become a lawyer, or a mystery novelist.
“The defendant is guilty, your honor!”
“What proof do you have?”
“Because I said so!”
Hey, if it’s good enough for my kids…
When my little niece was certain of something but had no proof of it at all, she would defiantly say, “I know it in my head!” It became something of a family catchphrase.
Amazing. Some magical, mystical format. . .that no TA or professor or anybody else ever mentioned. . .worth a full fifth of the entire grade!!
How many of the other students just happened to follow this “format” that was never mentioned by the professor or the TAs or anybody else?
I can’t even figure out what you might mean by “format” in this regard. Can you clarify?