The amount of people nitpicking about the brand of pseudocode or arguing the question is tricky reminds me of some coworkers, and not the good kind.
If you belong to the above category, try to learn some new programming language / read about some algorithm descriptions (not implementation) and go out take some sun. The question is super intuitive if you’re not stuck to a single paradigm or language.
So I teach coding to idiots. Confusing or poorly defined abstractions in pseudocode are bad. If you want people to infer useful information from pseudocode, and learn good practices from it, you need to treat it as if there a real underlying class structure written with good practices, or even better, make it comply to some actual language which does that. If you want to imply that this is a member of string, something like string.len_chars is way better imo because it captures the idea of a string being an array<char>. Then the next question can be about string.len_bytes (watch the wheels turn!). That naturally transitions nicely into object oriented paradigms of object containers/storage being at once a templated abstraction with a stride and depth, and also a physical thing in memory.
Having done OCR GCSE computing:
It’s just a pseudocode style language that they use in exam questions so that you can understand the question regardless of which language your school had you study (in my case it was VB6 💀). In questions where you are asked to write code, you can use the reference language but realistically you just use the one you learned (although I did it all in python instead)
Grading in red is generally avoided, nowadays. Red is closely associated with failure/danger/bad, and feedback should generally be constructive to help students learn and grow.
I usually like to grade in a bright colour that students are unlikely to pick: purple, green, pink, orange, or maybe light blue (if most students are working in pencil). Brown is poo. Black and dark blue are too common. Yellow is illegible. Red is aggressive.
Anyway, I’m guessing they just graded everything in green. The only time I’ve ever graded in more than one colour was when I needed to subgrade different categories of grades, like thinking/communication/knowledge/application. In that case, choosing a consistent colour for each category makes it easier to score.
I could’ve used a lot of things, but I’m on my phone and I wanted fewer characters to render it, whilst being sure it would work without having to run it.
Also, I am pleased to have maybe helped. Perhaps we can be friends, you and I. Perhaps not. Idk, maybe you punch dogs, why would you do that? Seems mean.
Have you ever just, like, edited a comment? How do people know when you did it? I guess if I were writing a thing to check it I’d use a registry of timestamps and checksums… So, like, ok, you can track, but why, how does it look?
Anyway sorry I had some drinks between now and first post, goodnight
Code as given can be made valid in scala I believe. My starter was based on that assumption. I think raku can do it too, but you would probably have to x = $ to make it work…
Edit: misread your comment slightly, CBA to change mine now. It is what it is
What is the type of the variable day though? As it is we have to make multiple assumptions, based on popular programming languages, about the internals of the string type and the print function to assume that it prints “6”.
Yes, it’s a full 24 hours, but a library doesn’t use 24:00:00 to represent the last hour, it’s 23:59:59. Once it hits 24:00, it rolls over to 00:00:00.
Hence my initial error of answering 23.
It’s not valid, but I don’t edit out erronous answers because I believe all data should be preserved, no matter how dumb it makes one look.
I think this is a good question and answer in the sense that it reveals a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of the student - exactly what you hope an exam would do! (Except for how this seems to combine javascript’s .length and python’s print statement - maybe there is a language like this though - or ‘print’ was a javascript function defined elsewhere).
This reminds me once of when I was a TA in a computer science course in the computer lab. Students were working on a “connect 4” game - drop a token in a column, try to connect 4. A student asked me, while writing the drop function, if he would have to write code to ensure that the token “fell” to bottom of the board, or if the computer would understand what it was trying to do. Excellent question! Because the question connects to a huge misunderstanding that the answer has a chance to correct.
For reference the “language” used in the exam would probably be Exam Reference Language (OCR exam board specifically, which I believe this question is from) which is just fancier pseudocode.
Teaching complete “clean slates” is a great way to re-evaluate your understanding.
I’ve had to teach a few apprentices and while they were perfectly reasonable and bright people, they had absolutely no idea, how computers worked internally. It’s really hard to put yourself in the shoes of such persons if it’s been too long since you were at this point of ignorance.
Second this. I’m a teacher aid and I get to fix student’s code for students who are not technically inclined. It’s so much fun and I’ve learned so much McGuivering all that shitty mess together.
“You should have known what the intent of the question was. Management won’t know or care about the internals of your code as long as it meets requirements. You have failed this test.”
Or
“You should know that you’re calling a function with invalid parameters. Where did you get your CS degree from again?”
“You should have known what the intent of the question was. Management won’t know or care about the internals of your code as long as it meets requirements. You have failed this test.”
“You should know that you’re calling a function with invalid parameters. Where did you get your CS degree from again?”
sigh you can have your ransom, just remove the cameras.
no the school can realistically choose any sensible language, the one in the exam question is a pseudocode one that is used only to make the exam questions understandable regardless of which language you studied
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