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From: bjorn@dataio.Dataio.UUCP (Bjorn Benson)
Newsgroups: net.cse
Subject: Re: Exams vs. Programming Assignments
Message-ID: <823@dataio.Dataio.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 24-Sep-85 12:24:53 EDT
Article-I.D.: dataio.823
Posted: Tue Sep 24 12:24:53 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 26-Sep-85 07:51:13 EDT
Reply-To: bjorn@dataio.UUCP (Bjorn Benson)
Organization: Data I/O Corp., Redmond WA
Lines: 21
Summary: CS != Programming

In article <2818@wateng.UUCP> clelau@wateng.UUCP (Eric C.L. Lau) writes:
> ...
>my complaint about exams that ask you to write a function that do this or that
>is that they don't really test whether you can program.  They test how fast
>you can think up an algorithm.
> ...
>       		     Having twenty minutes to write a syntactically
>and logically correct function will pick out the best students true but it
>leaves the average programmers in with the hopeless ones.

Computer Science is not Programming.
Just like Chemistry is not mixing chemicals.
Just like Physics in not watching pendulums.

Computer Science is Algorithms and Theory.
Engineering is Programming (and a bit more).

Grad School is for the best students, the ones who can think, not
(necessarily) the ones who can program.

					Bjorn Benson