Exams must Fall! The next student demand?

originally posted by: gb540
Borrow from the military: train hard fight easy.

Exams may be tough, but better to have your first proving there than in front of a new employer.

That's how my life has been. University was infinitely harder than the professional world. To the point that it has seriously warped my expectations of people. No one cares in the real world if something was done right, only that it works. In academia, it working was just a prerequisite to the overall assignment which is that it was done correctly. My university for my most recent degree was so harsh that I used to just go home, and cry in frustration over the fact that I was too stupid to fully understand the material I was being taught. More than once I had to walk out of a classroom, go to my car and just break down. That just doesn't happen in the working world.

Let me give an example. Here's a question I ask our potential applicants as a basic mathematical test:
You have an empty room with a window in it and a gun turret near the window on the west side of the room (assume 0 degrees is north). Explain to me the process to ensure the gun turret is at the window, pointed 5 degrees off center to the north, and facing out of the window. Furthermore explain how you would check that the gunner is behind the turret, within 1 foot of the rear of the turret, and is looking down the gun sights.

In university, this would be a simple question as part of a longer exam, and you would have at best 1 minute to answer this question. I give people 10, and almost everyone fails it, despite the fact that there's about 5 valid solutions for the problem and that we'll accept any of them. In academia only the best implementation of those 5 is accepted. It's one of two questions I ask, and getting either question right will almost guarantee you get hired.

The other question, if anyone is curious:
You're in a pawn store and you have a shopping cart of limited size. The store has 100 items on display, each item has a price, will take up a specific amount of space in your shopping cart, has a weight, and has a resale value as you plan to resell the items for profit later. If your cart gets too heavy, you will no longer be able to push your items and you have a fixed budget in order to purchase goods to resell. Give me a polynomial time algorithmic solution that will prove the combination of items allowing for maximum profit that can be carried in the cart while staying underneath your budget and weight allowance.

For that question you get 5 minutes. I ran this question past one of my former professors, he got it right, as expected and thought it was really mean. This is a question where why matters a lot more than what or how.

While it's great when someone does know these things, I've found that in general the working world just doesn't care. Knowledge is totally secondary to attitude. People that can work together can do something even if it's not optimal, while a bunch of brilliant know it alls who can't communicate can't do anything.

Observation: Spontaneous dancing seems to happen when South Africans are under stress, are protesting or ready to riot. I'm sure if you could decipher the steps you could tell what's coming next.

Eta: If anyone has a beef with Cecil Rhodes it should be the Boers more than the Blacks. The Boers lost their republics thanks to Rhodes while the Blacks benefited somewhat from British rule.

philosophy indeed.

I'm sorry they will be missing out on one of the great college pastimes...finding a babe and go "study for the exam" in the dorm room

ok then, let's have doctors and engineers who dont need to take tests to verify knowledge too, nothing could go wrong there. I'm sure it will all work out well.

originally posted by: annoyedpharmacist
ok then, let's have doctors and engineers who dont need to take tests to verify knowledge too, nothing could go wrong there. I'm sure it will all work out well.

Is that the fault of the students who don't know any better, or the fault of the adults who should know better that tell their children that university doesn't teach anything of value?