print("x")is you want to screw your students.screw your students
ಠ_ಠ
“Dr. Prof. Mann, I really didn’t understand anything about UNIX on that last midterm. Can we go over how to
touchandfingerafter class?”
I think this is a good question and answer in the sense that it reveals a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of the student - exactly what you hope an exam would do! (Except for how this seems to combine javascript’s .length and python’s print statement - maybe there is a language like this though - or ‘print’ was a javascript function defined elsewhere).
This reminds me once of when I was a TA in a computer science course in the computer lab. Students were working on a “connect 4” game - drop a token in a column, try to connect 4. A student asked me, while writing the drop function, if he would have to write code to ensure that the token “fell” to bottom of the board, or if the computer would understand what it was trying to do. Excellent question! Because the question connects to a huge misunderstanding that the answer has a chance to correct.
The answer is 6. It’s 6 characters long.
Not really, no. That would be the answer if x= len(day). The code in the image would just throw an error.
It’s obviously:
Traceback (most recent call last): File “./main.py”, line 2, in <module> AttributeError: ‘str’ object has no attribute ‘length’
Ah yes, all pseudocode is python
Ah yes, python is psuedocode
They missed out the context code:
trait DoW { def length: FiniteDuration } object Monday extends DoW { override def length = 24.hours } ... implicit def toDoW(s: String): DoW = s match { case "Monday" => Monday ... } var day: DoW = _(Duration formatting and language identification are left as an exercise for the reader)
I wonder if day length is given separately in a table prior to the question? I’m not sure what they wanted except maybe seconds?
It’s the length of the string. The number of characters is 6. It’s a play on words and a question.
I’m not really a fan of this kind of question. Especially if there’s enough questions that time will be an issue for most. Because at first glance it’s easy to think the answer might be the length of a day.
There shouldn’t be a need to try to trick people into the wrong answer on an open question. Maybe with multiple choice but not an open answer question.
I get your point about it being a trick question but I think in this case it’s pretty reasonable that you would see code like this in real life. Where the programming metaphor and your understanding of the real world clash. It’s a very important skill to be able to spot the difference.
The compiler or interpreter does that for you. There’s no point in these “gotcha’s”. They are cute brain teasers that belong on those useless “are you a programmer” quizzes you find on random meme websites, not an exam.
In the error shown a compiler would be just fine and run as usual but the person programming it would be expecting a different result so a compiler wouldn’t do this for you since it’s a logical error and not a syntax error.
If it’s a statically typed language and
xis of typeDate, it’s for sure throw a type error when trying to assign a string to it. If it had autoboxing / auto type conversion fromStringtoDate, length could return a number or a string.If this were Javascript on NodeJS, it would fail at
print(x)because that doesn’t exist in JS. If it were Python it would fail atx.lengthbecause that has to belen(x). And so on.If this were all to pass, at the latest at runtime, when the programmer sees the output “6”, they would know something’s up.
As I said, cute, but worthless test.
Are they using a red pen to write the checkmarks for correct answers to make it confusing but logical at least?
Grading in red is generally avoided, nowadays. Red is closely associated with failure/danger/bad, and feedback should generally be constructive to help students learn and grow.
I usually like to grade in a bright colour that students are unlikely to pick: purple, green, pink, orange, or maybe light blue (if most students are working in pencil). Brown is poo. Black and dark blue are too common. Yellow is illegible. Red is aggressive.
Anyway, I’m guessing they just graded everything in green. The only time I’ve ever graded in more than one colour was when I needed to subgrade different categories of grades, like thinking/communication/knowledge/application. In that case, choosing a consistent colour for each category makes it easier to score.
