What Scala?

[Nick Sabalausky]

"dsimcha" <dsimcha at yahoo.com> wrote in message 
news:gr31s9$2enc$1 at digitalmars.com...
> == Quote from Walter Bright (newshound1 at digitalmars.com)'s article
>> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> > If there's one thing my
>> > school experience taught me, it's that teachers are only interested in
>> > focusing on the low-to-mid-range students.
>> That wasn't my college experience at all (Caltech). I was a
>> low-to-mid-range student there
>
> ...Which kind of proves the point that the way knowledge/learning in 
> college is
> measured is pretty flawed in that it doesn't predict who will be 
> successful
> afterword.  I just finished undergrad a couple years ago and I feel that 
> the kinds
> of multiple choice exams you get in huge lecture-based classes are good at 
> testing
> rote memorization and superficial understanding and the ability to get 
> inside the
> professor's head, where as what's important is the ability to take your 
> knowledge
> and apply it to something useful or use it to create more knowledge.
>

Exactly. I remember this one class I had (wasn't cs though) where I tended 
to do poorly on the essay portions of the exams. At one point I decided to 
answer one of the essay questions by quoting the prof's lecture nearly 
verbatim, and got a perfect score.  Way to reward plagiarism and discourage 
independent thought. That was the final straw that killed off any last shred 
of interest I may have had in getting a decent grade.