Posted by tpc at December 3rd, 2006

I find it strange that students don’t bother to read instructions. Even on exams!

I have conducted 3 semesters of mini matlab training. At the end, the students need to do a quiz where they use matlab to perform some very routine computations. In order to make them do the computation with the software, as opposed to doing it by hand, the answers are usually ugly decimals. In spite of the written instruction on page 1 of the quiz that they must give their answers in decimals, some still use rational format — matlab will approximate the value with rationals and sometimes the same computation gives fractions that look different. It’s not a major sin to use rationals, just makes marking slightly more difficult, so I just let it go.

But I discovered some other instructors are not as forgiving. In one final exam, the instructions are that students can bring in one A4 sized cheat/help sheet. Some assumed it meant two sides, so they brought in two single-sided sheets and promptly had one of them confiscated. In that same exam, the instructions are that pencils are not to be used at all. That’s fair. But it seems that if you wrote in ink but used pencil to draw some accompanying graphs (like what I’m used to), the graphs will not be accepted.