Today, I spent two TTC tickets, ten cents, and a few hours writing the computer science exam. Since everyone is doing Visual Basic, and I didn't have any practical reason to learn Visual Basic, I petitioned my teacher to let me independently study C (which I need to get around to learning anyway). The result is that I always have my own test and I am special.
So our CS exam is put into the most awkward timeslot ever, 11:15 for two hours. We get to leave after ninety minutes which over half the students that were writing it did, since most people finished it in about an hour. To make it even worse, this was on the last day of exams so the entire school was empty except for us stupid CS students and maybe one other exam.
I didn't bother studying for this exam, since all it covered were input/output, looping, and branching. Quite honestly, I think I could've done the Visual Basic one and gotten incredibly good on it. It's basically the same drivel you get at the beginning of those learning how to program books, just with different syntax, and I could probably have figured that out from the examples.
When I actually start on the exam, I realize that I may have forgotten one or two minor things like whether <code>scanf()</code>-ing a character needed the variable to be referenced and a few other minor syntactical errors. For the most part, it was like clubbing a baby seal over the head. There were a few things that I didn't like about it though.
<ol><li>He assumed I listened in class about how to track variables through loops and stuff. I tried and made it semi-organized.</li><li>He usually named variables with single letters or 'x1' and 'x2'. My goodness that made it hard to read and follow ("wait, wait, is that x1 or x2 again?")</li><li>He typed the entire exam in Times New Roman. I don't have anything against Times New Roman, but you just do not type code in a variable-width font. It makes it incredibly difficult to read.</li><li>His brace and indentation style are absolutely horrendous. You <strong>do not</strong> indent the braces with your code block like so:
<code>if (1<2)
{
printf("hey\n");
}</code>
WRONG. Instead, try actually listening to Kernighan and Ritchie (the inventors of the bloody language) and do this:
<code>if (1<2) {
printf("hiya\n");
}</code>
I hate <code>&nbsp;</code>s. Why does blogger turn eight spaces into one space?</li></ol>I'm glad that's done. At least now I can look forward to TC.