All of my programing exams require coding on paper. The programs are usually convoluted toy problems that are a series of "gotcha" questions to test understanding. Most questions are really tricky, even if you know how to code.
Wondering how common this is.
Yes, we do that at my university as well. It makes no fucking sense to me.
Yeah and when they do post code there isn't any syntax highlighting. If you're reading through the code quickly it's easy to miss a bracket someplace and skip an entire sequence of steps, thus making every subsequent answer you give wrong due to one screw up. Our exams are also very, very long and often are rushed to finish quickly thus more prone to making mistakes due to the speed reading of the source code.
I don't think I've had to do much program writing on paper unless it was pseudocode. When I was in my freshman year, our midterms and exams had us predicting the output of certain snippets of code, or filling in blanks to get code to produce a certain output. Later classes focused mostly on algorithms and data structures, so everything was pseudocode. Towards my junior and senior year, a number of classes were either project based, and didn't have a final (and in some cases, didn't have a midterm), or were focused heavily on concepts, and so the final and midterm did not have any code writing at all.
Coding on paper is not unheard of, but I haven't really had to do it in the past.
Yep, I'll be doing that bullshit on wednsday for finals. Kill me, its just so jarring to not have the keyboard in front of you, as if I need added unfamiliarity of any kind during this shit.
All my exams are coding on paper. One class that wasn't was automata theory, as it was just all mathematical proofs.
Also, they make the programs so long it'd be very tedious to type the code to check your work (after) you get your exam back.
just wait until you have do it on a whiteboard in an interview
Depends here. Exams that are taken by several hundred students each semester tend to be on paper in my university unless they have a different solution.
My first programming course replaced their old paper exam with two big assignments that each student has to do in a month at home, because they weren't fond of on-paper programming. On the other hand, my software engineering course was purely on paper.
yep
If you're a competent programmer, you should be able to code on paper. Needing IDEs and syntax highlighting is brainlet-tier
Do you indent with spaces or tabs on paper?
yes
I use a marker cap.
I dropped out of college when I realized that CS was a waste of time.
The last class I took (java 2) made us write our toy command line calculators on the test itself and you'd get a zero if you got a compiler error.
This doesn't prove competency, it's just mindless busywork.
yes and it sucks ass
fucking old people
What are you doing now user?
It was pretty common to do coding on paper back in the 1980's in 3rd world countries. I'm Canadian and worked briefly with an old Afghani (a true blood one, not the ones that infested Afghanistan to fight). His name was Azeem. When he and I were better acquainted, and when he was ready, he would tell me the story of when he went to Kabul university, and with their limited resources, they would learn programming by writing it down on paper. He was graded that way. I thought how unfortunate it would be to have to learn programming that way, and how lucky I was in Canada to be learning programming on an actual computer. How primitive must it be to be forced to write your code on paper I would think to myself. Of course I would not say this out loud so as not to hurt Azeem. He had been through a lot avoiding the Soviet occupation and their torture tactics before making it out to Canada in the early 90s. Today he is but a humble builder of digital projectors. You reminded me of Azeem today. Thank you.
that fact that your class was java 2 and not an actual CS concept (data structures, operating systems, discrete mathematics) makes me think you go to a shit school or community college
a school that doesnt actually suck is going to teach on the conceptual level and use the language as a tool to tech the broader concept not just "hurr durr heres how to java gib degre pls"
I had to do a lot of that shit in high school and to a lesser extent in uni. I remember that in uni one of my exams was literally a printout of a C++ program with all kinds of convoluted inheritance and polymorphism, with a bunch of of printing to stdout all over the place. Our exam was to write down the program's output.
He means the second computing class at his uni used java....I hope.
to be fair every time i've had to whiteboard (only like 3 or 4 times in interviews) they've been happy with pseudocode but then again i'm more of a devops person than a developer
I took two Java courses in college and never used a computer
i had a friend who decided to get a CS degree from a shitty school and the class was literally COBOL 1 and 2... yes he learned cobol in 2015, no he doesnt use any of it. i urged him to drop out and spend his time that he wouldve spend studying just teaching himself stuff and building some projects but whatever
>studied 6 hours for an exam, went in really confident
>had 50 minutes to write two huge programs on fucking paper
Guess what, I fucking failed it. Fuck you, professor.
>tfw graduated today summa cum laude
>finals involved solving algorithms on paper
I mean I still doubt I'll find a job anytime soon, but still it feels good.
nobody expected you to pass anyway, you fucking autist
Honestly if you know your writing the final on paper, you should take your class notes on paper.
I do and have no problem with it.
My classmates who complain about having to code on paper are all idiots.
>writing out code on paper
>not reciting code verbally in front of the class
>writing code on paper
What in the fuck?
Why is that a thing?
Why is education so often overly primitive?
Going to college to learn any computer-related field is a scam, especially when the field isn't marred in expensive domain-specific hardware that you'd have no access to otherwise.
It's why you can teach yourself software development, but not computer aided CNC machining.
>have to write code on paper for class
>it's all small functions
>they don't care about syntax errors or remembering the names of stdlib functions
My school does this and I quite enjoy it. Weeds out those that are highly dependent on IDEs and stackoverflow. But then most people in my class are useless at programming to begin with it probably doesn't matter.
Yeah,
My final asked us to write out prims algorithm for finding minimum spanning tree's on a graph. then we had to recite a formal proof.
My second programming class was data structures and algorithms.
He's browsing Sup Forums, what do you think?
This.
I tell people I'm taking "Java II"(not him) as well because it's the second course with Java in it. It literally isn't called Java II. But easier to say that than explain what the course teaches / actually is
This.
It weeds out the boot camp only faggots.