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Bring Back the Blue-Book Exam

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Re: Bring Back the Blue-Book Exam

#71

Post by twic »

noosphr wrote: post #29
acbart wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many subskills that you must be proficient in without tools, before you can learn more interesting skills. You need to know how to do multiplication by hand before you rely on a calculator. If you can't do multiplication with a calculator, you're not going to be able to make sense of the concepts in Algebra.

Algebra has nothing to do with long hand multiplication, people who say otherwise can't do either. We know, because we taught computers how to do both. The first long multiplication algorithm was written for the Colossus about 10 minutes after they got it working. The first computer algebra system that could manage variable substitution had to wait for Lisp to be invented 10 years later.

Baby rather than Colossus. Colossus wasn't programmable.

Re: Bring Back the Blue-Book Exam

#72

Post by hollandheese »

Syzygies wrote: post #36

One can't have an informed opinion on this without witnessing how grading a college exam takes place, first hand. Grading a stack of blue books is a "just kill me now" brutal experience. A majority of cognitive effort is just finding the page for the next problem to grade, with finding the answer another delay; any programming language with this kind of access latency would stay a "one bus" language. So of course pro…

Huh? Blue books are typically used for essays and are graded whole.

I've never seen anyone attempt blue books for anything else.

Re: Bring Back the Blue-Book Exam

#73

Post by kjkjadksj »

Syzygies wrote: post #36

One can't have an informed opinion on this without witnessing how grading a college exam takes place, first hand. Grading a stack of blue books is a "just kill me now" brutal experience. A majority of cognitive effort is just finding the page for the next problem to grade, with finding the answer another delay; any programming language with this kind of access latency would stay a "one bus" language. So of course pro…

Speaking as someone who has graded in grad school, the general advice is to look at a few questions before you start dishing out points so you can refine your internal rubric. Going back is also done because that is easier than having a student show up at office hours and ask why sally only got marked down 3 points for the same mistake on question 5.

Re: Bring Back the Blue-Book Exam

#74

Post by noosphr »

twic wrote: post #71
noosphr wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Algebra has nothing to do with long hand multiplication, people who say otherwise can't do either. We know, because we taught computers how to do both. The first long multiplication algorithm was written for the Colossus about 10 minutes after they got it working. The first computer algebra system that could manage variable substitution had to wait for Lisp to be invented 10 years later.

Baby rather than Colossus. Colossus wasn't programmable.

>Jack Good, a veteran of Colossus practice at Bletchley Park, later claimed that, if appropriately configured, Colossus could almost have carried out a multiplication but that this would not have been possible in practice because of constraints on what could be accomplished in a processing cycle. We have no reason to doubt this, though it would presumably have required special settings of the code wheels and message tape and been, even if possible, a rather inefficient alternative to a desktop calculator. This fact has been offered as proof of the flexibility of Colossus, which in a sense it does attest to: a device designed without any attention to numerical computations could almost have multiplied thanks to the flexibility with which logical conditions could be combined. Yet it also proves the very real differences between Colossus and devices designed for scientific computation. Multiplications were vital to computations, and a device that could not multiply would not, by the standard of the 1940s, be termed a “computer “or “calculator.”

https://www.sigcis.org/files/Haigh%20-%20Colossus%20and%20th...

The limitation seems to have been physical rather than logical.

Re: Bring Back the Blue-Book Exam

#75

Post by pragma_x »

i_am_proteus wrote: post #68
refulgentis wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, how is AI assistance on an in class exam even possible? I can't picture how AI changed anything from, say, post-iPhone. i.e. I expect there to be holes in security re: bathroom breaks, but even in 2006 they confiscated cell phones during exams. I guess what I'm asking is, how did AI shift the status quo for in class exams over, say, Safari?

People bring in second phones: one to have confiscated, one to use on the exam. A common mode I have seen is phone in lap, front-facing camera ingests an exam page hung over the edge of the desk. Student then flips the page and looks down for the answer.

Seems easy to thwart with two exam proctors, one at each end of the exam room. Hypothetically, the whole affair is going for maximum manual effort (grading), so why not double down on test-taking labor too?

Re: Bring Back the Blue-Book Exam

#76

Post by pragma_x »

twic wrote: post #70
OptionOfT wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They come to me after passing a challenging online test that has controls to check for browser focus lost, opening new tabs etc. These are the absolute worst. You're taking people out of their comfort zone (highly customized IDE like JetBrains / VSCode / Vim) which cause them to lose shortcuts and decently working intellisense. Yes, my TypeScript in my projects is configured in such a way that I get way more inform…

The flip side is that the expectation is not very high. The interviewer knows you're not working in a proper professional coding environment, so they don't expect proper professional code. They do expect you to be able to produce basic working code without those tools, and to think about the problem, which does not require tools.

FWIW, that's about where the bar is set with live coding exercises during a job interview. I've done this, both at a whiteboard, and online in a provided web sandbox.

Re: Bring Back the Blue-Book Exam

#77

Post by rubidium »

hollandheese wrote: post #72
Syzygies wrote: post #36

One can't have an informed opinion on this without witnessing how grading a college exam takes place, first hand. Grading a stack of blue books is a "just kill me now" brutal experience. A majority of cognitive effort is just finding the page for the next problem to grade, with finding the answer another delay; any programming language with this kind of access latency would stay a "one bus" language. So of course pro…

Huh? Blue books are typically used for essays and are graded whole. I've never seen anyone attempt blue books for anything else.

I used them in graduate physics courses 2008-2010

Re: Bring Back the Blue-Book Exam

#78

Post by SoftTalker »

hollandheese wrote: post #72
Syzygies wrote: post #36

One can't have an informed opinion on this without witnessing how grading a college exam takes place, first hand. Grading a stack of blue books is a "just kill me now" brutal experience. A majority of cognitive effort is just finding the page for the next problem to grade, with finding the answer another delay; any programming language with this kind of access latency would stay a "one bus" language. So of course pro…

Huh? Blue books are typically used for essays and are graded whole. I've never seen anyone attempt blue books for anything else.

Late 1980s blue books for almost everything that wasn’t multiple choice. The other style was multiple pages, with large “show your work here” areas below each question.

Re: Bring Back the Blue-Book Exam

#79

Post by downrightmike »

ipcress_file wrote: post #39
Syzygies wrote: post #36

One can't have an informed opinion on this without witnessing how grading a college exam takes place, first hand. Grading a stack of blue books is a "just kill me now" brutal experience. A majority of cognitive effort is just finding the page for the next problem to grade, with finding the answer another delay; any programming language with this kind of access latency would stay a "one bus" language. So of course pro…

I think problem number one is that you had 200 exams to grade.

The children yearn to learn. And the admin cuts costs.

Re: Bring Back the Blue-Book Exam

#80

Post by lispisok »

CompoundEyes wrote: post #34

There are schemes happening in interviews too. I've been doing many technical interviews for a senior role with off shore candidates lately. They come to me after passing a challenging online test that has controls to check for browser focus lost, opening new tabs etc. I think it may require a camera to be on too. Even with that more than half of the candidates can't code. Our interview usually starts with them breat…

Have you considered using onshore candidates instead?
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