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Comment by Jacobi | Hacker News Reader

"The exam included questions from the lectures" When I was a student I hated this practice from some professors.

I used to do this to put in at least one or two softball questions. It helped to weed out who was paying attention and helped when deciding if someone should get a C or C+.

You shouldn't be grading then. They are not taking a class in Paying Attention, they are taking a class in algorithms. If they know the material, that is what matters. I also cannot stand this practice.

Yeah, look to Bjarne Stroustrup, he gave all of us C++, no questions asked.

And people who know the material should be able to answer those questions without any difficulty. What's the problem?

I'm assuming the problem is questions like this:

  Recall the Master Method and its three parameters a,b,d. Which of the following is the best interpretation of b^d, in the context of divide-and-conquer algorithms?

Alternatively, the problem might be questions that ask for the state of an algorithm at some point, when the algorithm can be correctly implemented in different ways and one is expected to recall/go back and check the exact implementation used.

Those kind of questions should be taken out back and put out of their misery, but I don't think there's anything to suggest that adestefan was asking those kinds of questions.

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