In a message of Thu, 05 Jul 2007 18:48:49 EDT, "Andy Judkis" writes:

I've just completed my 6th semester as a teacher, teaching 2 sections per

semester of a 10th grade course that includes a 4 week introduction to programming in Python. Here's a question from one of my exams:

Write Python code that will ask the user how who is the best looking teacher in the school. The program must loop until the user responds eit her "Mrs. McGrath" or "Mr. Judkis". If the use responds "Mr. Judkis", the program must print out "Excellent choice." If the user responds "Mrs. McGrath", the program must print out "Also a fine choice." If the user responds with anything else, the program must print out "Wrong, sorry." a nd ask again.

Rather than catalog my frustrations, let me just pose a question to you all -- how much Python exposure do you think it should take before a stud ent should be able to answer this question? If a student can't even answer this, is it reasonable to say that they have learned any programming at a ll? (I know that they might have learned something -about- programming, but t hat is not the same thing.)

Thanks,

Andy Judkis

One way to know a lot about programming, but to be unable to solve this exam question is to not know how to accept input from a terminal. Could they have read teacher names from a file and solved the question? from a command line? From a gui toolkit? Personally, I almost never need to use input or raw_input in real life, so I always have to look it up whenever I do find I need it. I suspect that I might fail your exam if you don't allow me to browse python docs while writing it. Laura