Myes... welcome to the brave new world of buying your games one strip at a time I think the simplest and most elegant way of making this fad die amongst developers is also the best way of getting back at them for ramming this down our throats in the first place. Now... it'll take a bit of coordination... and a very very small degree of work... bah.. fuck it
I would hope that a US judge would throw that kind of stupid shite out the instant it crossed his/her desk... but given this kind of shenanigans your post deserves the "+1, sad but true" mod:S
His references include an undergrad level textbook on physics, as opposed to the usual slew of papers outlining new developments in the field. Undergrad physics books are geared towards undergrad courses... which is why you see things like: "assume no friction due to air" in trajectory problems. His second reference is Maxwell's treaty on electricity and magnetism... hardly a new work.
In short, odds are he picked up a textbook and started playing with simplified equations and figures he's made a "discovery" that no one else has noticed until now.... HUGE HUGE Kudos if it's true.... but the magic 8-ball's sayin "outcome not likely"
A previous post by someone else in this thread made it sound like/. was full of greedy cd-burning pirates who would happily fuck over the artists by never-ever-ever actually buying music either because of how socially irresponsible they are or how much they hate the RIAA... so in a way, I was simply troll-baiting, because I think that those premises about the/. crowd are horse-shit.
Looks like you actually did put some thought into why, and, yeah, even though your numbers are probably way off, AOL has the size advantage and the economy of scale doesn't really favour the slashdot-marketing-effect... dah well... I'm sure W-AL will be just fine... I for one will probably go out and buy his CD.
I'm using a Cogeco* VoIP phone, and it's awesome. It's clear as a bell, whereas the Bell POTS connection that I had previously had enough static on the line that it made it tremendously hard to hear the conversation. For the longest time I thought it was the handset...You can imagine my surprise when I switched over, used the same handset, and found that all that static had disappeared.
* - I don't work for Cogeco and frankly couldn't care less if they survived or went belly-up tomorrow... but they're a cable company and it fits with TFA...
That's just my point though; those are entrance exams. Would you actually want to design a multiple choice test for those grad courses? In my experience, multiple choice tests that are actually hard are hard because they're fucking tricky. They're tests where you either have to have some sort of uncanny insight into how the problem works, or you've got to work out most of the problem by hand on scrap paper (in which case the test suddenly starts taking a lot longer than you have... and suddenly it's no longer a test of how well you know the material, but how fast you can scribble your notes down and come close enough to the answer that you can colour in the circle and carry on to the next question...)
Maybe that's just personal opinion though. I'm military, as well as a grad student in comp sci (in my alma-mater, so no GRE for me), so I've seen a shite load of both tests. The multiple choice tests were almost always military tests... though military tests are almost always short answer... but there were still enough multi-choice tests in that mix... From those military tests, I learned to despise multiple-guess exams as well as tests based on how well you've memorized fifty lists of "characteristics" of this system or that system... because of that, I'll take whatever form of practical exam you can throw at me.
The way I figure it, if you want to test me on how well I've learned the material in your course, then give me a fucking project wherein I have to apply what you've taught me. (keep in mind, we're not talking undergrad anymore... this is strictly post-grad level, so smaller classes are the norm.) If you can't think of a way to ensure heterogeneity of projects in such a way that it's difficult/impossible/undesireable for students to cheat, then perhaps you should rethink your position as faculty in your school. (Note that I mean "you" generically, and not You Darkwhite)
Another thing that usually separates "hard" multiple choice exams from "easy" multiple choice exams, is that the "hard" ones (if they don't fall into the group where you either see it, and have time to finish the test, or don't see it and have to work it out longhand and then risk not completing the test) usually have to rely on questioning you on the most esoteric parts of the subject matter they can possibly find. I've seen questions on multiple choice exams that were so far "out there", in terms of asking for an answer based on material that is only barely relevant to the "core" aspects of the course, that they may as well have asked "What is the third word in the fifth paragraph of page 54 in the course textbook?"
First year engineering tests are almost as bad. A lot of them test you to see how well you've memorized all the formulas presented in class, and don't actually test you to see how well you either know how to use them, or how well you understand where they came from. I don't know how many physics-type tests I took where I spent a good 40 minutes of a 3 hour exam deriving fucking formulas that I had forgotten, so that I could complete the test. bah... humbug
Oh come off it... in a 1492 bit packet, let's say 1500 bit for convenience sake there's only 1500^2 possible combinations of bits to look at...er... wait...fuck.... that's bytes isn't it? So it'd be 1500^8 eh?... bah... fuck it... yer a smart cat... I'm sure you'll figure it out...
There were rumours at one point in time about 5 years ago that the CF (Cdn Military) was going to replace all of it's 9mm pistols with that bad boy.... I was overjoyed.... and then it turned out to be false... we've still got those browning pieces of shite... =(
if you go back to the original comment, you'll see that it was based on the premise of a multiple choice math exam
As to this post: I added the part about "going through all the material" in response to an allusion you made... and even if you wanted to take it completely out of context and read it in isolation, it's fairly clear that it's referring to all the material the prof wishes to test... the fact that you are twisting my words around to make it sound like it has to cover every shred of material in the course only means that I'm being trolled... so I'll end this lovely charade here
The appropriate response to the beginning of your post is: Go fuck yourself, and at least I have the balls to post that non-AC
To reply to the rest of the post, I do have to concede that some of the most frightening tests are multiple choice... like the LSATs... I should also like to point out that this is an entrance exam, as are most of the other good ones I can think of. They're not testing you in the same way that a final exam should be. In the case of the LSAT, it's an aptitude test (albeit a fucking hard one) whereas a final exam is supposed to be a test of how well you actually learned the material.
You quote a QM course as being a good venue for this type of test... I call bullshit. If there's not enough time to work the problem out in full, then how the fuck is a multiple choice test going to be built that actually tests whether or not you're capable of doing so? And if a test cannot be built to allow you to go through all the material by working a problem or two from each sub-domain out in full, then it should be a take home, or the prof should get off his/her lazy ass and build a better "test" in the form of, say, a project.
I stand by my statement that a university giving multiple choice exams to post-grad students is a farce...
I know... that's why I pointed it out to you. The whole act of cheating can *almost* be understood in some of the (for lack of a better descriptor) lower eschelons of learning. Once you hit the PG level though, I find it hard to believe that anyone can even manage to pull off cheating. I'm not sure who's smarter for it, me for not having to cheat, or them for being able to cheat the system whilst I sit here in shock wondering how the hell you can cheat in a PG context... it boggles... either that or some degrees are an absolute joke....
Note that they said The study focused on 5,300 graduate students... these guys aren't graduates of an undergrad degree. These are students who are working on their MSc's, MA's, MBA's, PhD's, etc... They're what you do after that undergrad degree you mentioned.
That's not a troll.... that's the honest to god truth. What the hell kind of mickey-mouse university would have a graduate level math course that's multiple choice?! It boggles the mind so much that I can't even be bothered to post AC. This isn't fucking grade 11 Algebra they're talking about here. This is GRADUATE LEVEL (read: Masters or PhD)... saying that a university that would do this is a pile of steaming dog shite is being too kind...
troll? I laughed when I read it... it may be in bad taste, but I wouldn't call this a troll, there's nothing really to reply to, except the dysfunctional moderation.
IANAL, but I believe the Full Faith and Credit clause of the US Constitution allows rulings and judgements to be imposed in other states.
IANAG (I Am Not A Geographer), but I believe the United Kingdom is not actually beholden to the US Constitution since (and this my come as a shock to some/. readers) the UK isn't actually a state within the US... I know... I know... shocking... isn't it?
Actually I haven't bought an XBox either.... I'm probably not going to. There is a difference between tactics though. Microsoft is fairly in-your-face in their tactics... the sony DRM rootkit was about as sneaky and underhanded as it gets. One company dares you to defy them (and hence, has some balls) and the other sneaks poison into your box... I'm far from an MS fanboy, but I've got more respect for them than sony atm.
The mods will most assuredly mod me down again but I don't care. I'm still rather torqued about the Rootkit bullshit that Sony pulled. They could drop the price down to $50/unit and I still wouldn't buy it.
Slashdot Mirror
I just hope Nintendo is paying attention...
Myes... welcome to the brave new world of buying your games one strip at a time I think the simplest and most elegant way of making this fad die amongst developers is also the best way of getting back at them for ramming this down our throats in the first place. Now... it'll take a bit of coordination... and a very very small degree of work... bah.. fuck it
I'm hittin IHOP...
I was playing this game this morning after reading penny arcade. It's incredibly simplistic... if strangely addictive...
Not surprisingly, we appear to have killed his server
I would hope that a US judge would throw that kind of stupid shite out the instant it crossed his/her desk... but given this kind of shenanigans your post deserves the "+1, sad but true" mod :S
It does seem rather bogus
His references include an undergrad level textbook on physics, as opposed to the usual slew of papers outlining new developments in the field. Undergrad physics books are geared towards undergrad courses... which is why you see things like: "assume no friction due to air" in trajectory problems. His second reference is Maxwell's treaty on electricity and magnetism... hardly a new work.
In short, odds are he picked up a textbook and started playing with simplified equations and figures he's made a "discovery" that no one else has noticed until now.... HUGE HUGE Kudos if it's true.... but the magic 8-ball's sayin "outcome not likely"
yes, and that's not exactly your standard multiple-guess exam either :-)
Those "prove the following true or false" questions were always fun
A previous post by someone else in this thread made it sound like /. was full of greedy cd-burning pirates who would happily fuck over the artists by never-ever-ever actually buying music either because of how socially irresponsible they are or how much they hate the RIAA... so in a way, I was simply troll-baiting, because I think that those premises about the /. crowd are horse-shit.
Looks like you actually did put some thought into why, and, yeah, even though your numbers are probably way off, AOL has the size advantage and the economy of scale doesn't really favour the slashdot-marketing-effect... dah well... I'm sure W-AL will be just fine... I for one will probably go out and buy his CD.
Why, exactly?
...anecdotal evidence for you:
I'm using a Cogeco* VoIP phone, and it's awesome. It's clear as a bell, whereas the Bell POTS connection that I had previously had enough static on the line that it made it tremendously hard to hear the conversation. For the longest time I thought it was the handset...You can imagine my surprise when I switched over, used the same handset, and found that all that static had disappeared.
* - I don't work for Cogeco and frankly couldn't care less if they survived or went belly-up tomorrow... but they're a cable company and it fits with TFA...
That's just my point though; those are entrance exams. Would you actually want to design a multiple choice test for those grad courses? In my experience, multiple choice tests that are actually hard are hard because they're fucking tricky. They're tests where you either have to have some sort of uncanny insight into how the problem works, or you've got to work out most of the problem by hand on scrap paper (in which case the test suddenly starts taking a lot longer than you have... and suddenly it's no longer a test of how well you know the material, but how fast you can scribble your notes down and come close enough to the answer that you can colour in the circle and carry on to the next question...)
Maybe that's just personal opinion though. I'm military, as well as a grad student in comp sci (in my alma-mater, so no GRE for me), so I've seen a shite load of both tests. The multiple choice tests were almost always military tests... though military tests are almost always short answer... but there were still enough multi-choice tests in that mix... From those military tests, I learned to despise multiple-guess exams as well as tests based on how well you've memorized fifty lists of "characteristics" of this system or that system... because of that, I'll take whatever form of practical exam you can throw at me.
The way I figure it, if you want to test me on how well I've learned the material in your course, then give me a fucking project wherein I have to apply what you've taught me. (keep in mind, we're not talking undergrad anymore... this is strictly post-grad level, so smaller classes are the norm.) If you can't think of a way to ensure heterogeneity of projects in such a way that it's difficult/impossible/undesireable for students to cheat, then perhaps you should rethink your position as faculty in your school. (Note that I mean "you" generically, and not You Darkwhite)
Another thing that usually separates "hard" multiple choice exams from "easy" multiple choice exams, is that the "hard" ones (if they don't fall into the group where you either see it, and have time to finish the test, or don't see it and have to work it out longhand and then risk not completing the test) usually have to rely on questioning you on the most esoteric parts of the subject matter they can possibly find. I've seen questions on multiple choice exams that were so far "out there", in terms of asking for an answer based on material that is only barely relevant to the "core" aspects of the course, that they may as well have asked "What is the third word in the fifth paragraph of page 54 in the course textbook?"
First year engineering tests are almost as bad. A lot of them test you to see how well you've memorized all the formulas presented in class, and don't actually test you to see how well you either know how to use them, or how well you understand where they came from. I don't know how many physics-type tests I took where I spent a good 40 minutes of a 3 hour exam deriving fucking formulas that I had forgotten, so that I could complete the test. bah... humbug
yer absolutely right *hangs head in shame* ... it was meant to be a joke... /sigh
Oh come off it... in a 1492 bit packet, let's say 1500 bit for convenience sake there's only 1500^2 possible combinations of bits to look at...er... wait...fuck.... that's bytes isn't it? So it'd be 1500^8 eh?... bah... fuck it... yer a smart cat... I'm sure you'll figure it out...
There were rumours at one point in time about 5 years ago that the CF (Cdn Military) was going to replace all of it's 9mm pistols with that bad boy.... I was overjoyed.... and then it turned out to be false... we've still got those browning pieces of shite... =(
As to this post: I added the part about "going through all the material" in response to an allusion you made... and even if you wanted to take it completely out of context and read it in isolation, it's fairly clear that it's referring to all the material the prof wishes to test... the fact that you are twisting my words around to make it sound like it has to cover every shred of material in the course only means that I'm being trolled... so I'll end this lovely charade here
HAND
The appropriate response to the beginning of your post is: Go fuck yourself, and at least I have the balls to post that non-AC
To reply to the rest of the post, I do have to concede that some of the most frightening tests are multiple choice... like the LSATs... I should also like to point out that this is an entrance exam, as are most of the other good ones I can think of. They're not testing you in the same way that a final exam should be. In the case of the LSAT, it's an aptitude test (albeit a fucking hard one) whereas a final exam is supposed to be a test of how well you actually learned the material.
You quote a QM course as being a good venue for this type of test... I call bullshit. If there's not enough time to work the problem out in full, then how the fuck is a multiple choice test going to be built that actually tests whether or not you're capable of doing so? And if a test cannot be built to allow you to go through all the material by working a problem or two from each sub-domain out in full, then it should be a take home, or the prof should get off his/her lazy ass and build a better "test" in the form of, say, a project.
I stand by my statement that a university giving multiple choice exams to post-grad students is a farce...
I know... that's why I pointed it out to you. The whole act of cheating can *almost* be understood in some of the (for lack of a better descriptor) lower eschelons of learning. Once you hit the PG level though, I find it hard to believe that anyone can even manage to pull off cheating. I'm not sure who's smarter for it, me for not having to cheat, or them for being able to cheat the system whilst I sit here in shock wondering how the hell you can cheat in a PG context... it boggles... either that or some degrees are an absolute joke....
Note that they said The study focused on 5,300 graduate students... these guys aren't graduates of an undergrad degree. These are students who are working on their MSc's, MA's, MBA's, PhD's, etc... They're what you do after that undergrad degree you mentioned.
That's not a troll.... that's the honest to god truth. What the hell kind of mickey-mouse university would have a graduate level math course that's multiple choice?! It boggles the mind so much that I can't even be bothered to post AC. This isn't fucking grade 11 Algebra they're talking about here. This is GRADUATE LEVEL (read: Masters or PhD)... saying that a university that would do this is a pile of steaming dog shite is being too kind...
troll? I laughed when I read it... it may be in bad taste, but I wouldn't call this a troll, there's nothing really to reply to, except the dysfunctional moderation.
well, hurry up and post the link... I'd put money on you getting a +5 informative... hell... people get it for pseudo-random wikipedia links :)
Hurry, it's your only chance of getting a +5 Informative
I'm only being a little facetious... I want to know what the hell they're talking about too :-)
IANAL, but I believe the Full Faith and Credit clause of the US Constitution allows rulings and judgements to be imposed in other states.
IANAG (I Am Not A Geographer), but I believe the United Kingdom is not actually beholden to the US Constitution since (and this my come as a shock to some /. readers) the UK isn't actually a state within the US... I know... I know... shocking... isn't it?
meh... who needs good karma anyway :)
I haven't actually taken a look at the wii... except for the weird-assed controller... maybe I will...
Actually I haven't bought an XBox either.... I'm probably not going to. There is a difference between tactics though. Microsoft is fairly in-your-face in their tactics... the sony DRM rootkit was about as sneaky and underhanded as it gets. One company dares you to defy them (and hence, has some balls) and the other sneaks poison into your box... I'm far from an MS fanboy, but I've got more respect for them than sony atm.
If only Nintendo wasn't such a joke...
The mods will most assuredly mod me down again but I don't care. I'm still rather torqued about the Rootkit bullshit that Sony pulled. They could drop the price down to $50/unit and I still wouldn't buy it.