Subj : Re: Auto-grading aptitude tests
To   : comp.programming,comp.software-eng
From : rem642b
Date : Wed Aug 24 2005 06:44 pm

> From: g...@best.cut.here.com
> I had a queueing theory professor (Kleinrock) who allowed students to
> buy part of an answer for a few exam points.  The idea was rather than
> having the student be stuck, giving the student a bit of assistance
> would help the student complete the rest of the exam question.
> Is there some reason why this type of assistance should not be
> available in testing software engineers?  Especially since in jobs,
> software engineers don't operate in vacuums; they consult man pages,
> help pages, web pages, even other software engineers for assistance in
> solving problems.

Yes, we're in agreement! One common jargon to keep in mind is "value
added". If somebody is asked to recite a definition, and so they go
online and copy the definition from WikiPedia and paste it to their
exam sheet, they have added no value, their instructor could have
looked it up him/herself faster than asking the student to do it. But
if a student/employee is supposed to write a working program, and the
student/employee then goes online to look up the API and some other
info, and puts it all together to yield a working program, then the
student/employee really has added considerable value beyond what was
already available online. I suppose the least quantity of value-added
service would be a system integrator, who merely finds software readily
available online to perform the various steps of the overall task,
downloads each, and tells the boss how to use each of them to solve
each individual step of the overall problem, not even bothering to
write a glue script that ties them together so the boss could issue a
single command to run all the programs in sequence.

.