Summary: What use is an exam in a computer science or engineering course? It’s not like we expect our students to be writing programs or designing algorithms in the real world in one-to-two hour crunch-mode chunks. Furthermore, one of the most frequent complaints by students in our courses concerns exams, e.g., their length, difficulty, or relevance. When should we use exams, and how do we design and grade exams that are fair and meet the learning goals we’ve set forth?

Professor Benjamin Pierce will present his philosophy on exams in a computer science course and answer the following questions: What value do exams bring to a computer science classroom? How do you craft a meaningful exam? How do you grade an exam?

All graduate students are welcome. This event grows out of concerns in the Computer and Information Science department and so may be most useful to students in related fields.
Counts toward the CTL Teaching Certificate.