Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

I’m in the middle of my computer science student assembly language exam right now.

It’s one of the rare times when I have a lecture class before they have their exam.

It is, after all, a three hour period, all of which I do not want to use for their exam (and neither do they).

And even though I introduced new commands during the lecture, all of them are just in a way shortcuts or combinations of previously discussed commands.

So in the programming part of the exam, it’s still possible for them to answer using only all the commands we’ve taken up before. But they could also use the new ones.

After showing them the shortcuts, then I went to the applications of the string commands, such as concatenation, deleting a substring and the all important parsing.

There were also points in the lecture where I gave them a table of definition for certain commands, then I told them that we could either fill out a second table in class or they could do it themselves during the exam.

Before we stopped for a break (where they could photocopy certain notes, the ASCII table and program printouts from their classmates and discuss the execution of the applications enumerated earlier) I asked them whether they wanted an open notes or closed notes exam. Even though one of them already had feedback from some of my other students about closed notes exams (maybe it was the one with a certain student) he reluctantly raised his hand when he saw that most of his classmates still wanted an open notes exam.

For one, I knew it was because he had already printed out a lot of their exercises for his reference, so he didn’t want that to be a waste. For others, they didn’t want their grade to rely on what commands they had memorized, but on how they are able to analyze given code and construct codes with an available reference of the commands. I admire that attitude more.

It’s also refreshing how different the outlook of the students are in this class compared to the engineering one (then again, I behave differently in their class because of a certain classmate of theirs, which may be affecting their reception to learning what I’m presenting as well, and negatively at that).

Session 2435 likes the doors that can potentially open than sitting in a perceived comfort zone. Class dismissed.