Student "edition" found at {thoughts dot com slash typed no space out no space loud slash blog}.

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

My exam in assembly language yesterday was a combination of code tracing/programming analysis and code generation.

Because of some negative feedback then, I removed the code tracing part of the exam for the second part.

This, if it will be recalled, is where there were four topics to their exam that I split into two topics per day.

The first day it was strings and one-dimensional arrays. For today it was multi-dimensional arrays and records.

Also unofficially part of their exam for today were subroutines and floating point representation.

The questions yesterday were about inserting a substring (which one of them called concatenation to the middle of a string, wrong given that the definition of concatenate says strings have to be end to end), checking for a palindrome, binary search of a sorted array and insertion into the middle of an array.

What they had a problem with was the third one, because they forgot that inverting a number and adding one is the same as getting the negative of that number. Besides, it is something they probably have never seen in implementation.

I do recall giving them the code of using it once during the first part of the term though, so they were not entirely clueless.

Add to that the fact that the exam was open notes, so they really had no excuse to be ignorant of anything.

The questions for today was how to swap two records in an array of records which is basically just copying a string to a temporary variable, then it was setting the number of bytes for a record that represents all the data for a student during a term up to the computation of the GPA (this is where the floating point representation comes in), and lastly how to compare two elements of a string given the indices.

The last one said they were supposed to call a subroutine given already the coordinates of both numbers (it was like the memory card game, or apparently as one student compared it, like a game called Prime Suspect) but some students thought they still had to get the input from the user.

Also there was supposed to be error checking if the two cards at those positions had already been picked, or if the same coordinates are given for both cards. The subroutine is not supposed to do anything if the two numbers or cards are not matched, but it should set the cards to zero if the same.

For the palindrome I made it to be case sensitive to be easier (no need to check for uppercase or lower case) and for the insertion there was supposed to be an error message if the index given is outside the current volume of the array, or of the array is already full (no need to ask for the index).

It was also funny that a student would approach my desk and start to ask a question, only to realize that the information he started to ask for was already provided. This happened several times.

It was almost irritating though how sometimes a student could be marred from comprehending a concept due to his prior stock knowledge.

Session 2893 is not sure about being ready for next term. Class dismissed.