Re: [LAU] Exam Cheating investigation

On Saturday 18 January 2014 17:16:38 Fons Adriaensen did opine:

> On Sat, Jan 18, 2014 at 01:24:22PM -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > I'm sorry if that reflects poorly on the composer of that particular
> > exam, but what you want, is not to test the memory of the test taker,
> > but to test their powers of deduction.
>
> Even so, students taking a course on the history of Western classical
> music should be able to identify Pierrot Lunaire without requiring
> internet resources. More so if during the course they had the
> opportunity to hear it.

That sort of musical knowledge is definitely out of my field of relative
expertise. Above my pay grade IOW. :)

> And I don't agree with the idea that knowledge
> (as opposed to the application of it) is a thing of the past. If I had
> to look up every equation I use on Wikipedia I'd consider myself to be
> a very lousy DSP programmer.

That may reflect on the diffs in our ages as much as anything else, Fons.
Approaching 80 yo, I'd probably make a lousy DSP programmer.
 
> > I learned to do square roots on paper, probably something over 70
> > years ago, but today I'd have to use a calculator AND the answer
> > would have to make sense
>
> You'd be surprised to know the percentage of people that would
> accept *any* result from a calculator, even if it doesn't make
> sense at all.

Scary isn't it?
 
> When I was in high school most math or physics teachers would
> accept an error in the calculations for an exam problem if the
> logic of the solution was right. But I had one who didn't. His
> reasoning was that if you make a stupid calculation error as an
> engineer, the result would be as useless as if you didn't grasp
> the problem at all. The bridge would collapse or the airplane
> would fall out of the sky. And he was right. Remember the 10^8
> dollar NASA Mars probe that got lost because JPL was using
> imperial units while NASA expected metric ones ?

Yes, the ultimate forehead slapper, a 100 Billion dollar one. But nobody's
head was paraded around on a pike over it either. That is almost as sad.
Only we, the taxpayer paid for JPL's mistake AFAIK. It should have been
common knowledge that the biggest contributor to JPL's payroll had been
mandating metric units for decades when that little "forehead slapper"
occurred.

> Ciao,

Cheers Fons, Gene

-- 
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Required reading: 
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