It is indeed wrong. The correct answer would be 24.
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The answer is 6. It’s 6 characters long.
Not really, no. That would be the answer if x= len(day). The code in the image would just throw an error.
How do you know what language this is?
Yea, it’s pseudo code.
“Monday”.length is working JavaScript and does equal 6. No print command afaik though.
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You don’t need terminating semicolons in JavaScript. They’re added in if missing. It can actually cause a few bugs around returns.
function print(str) { console.log(str) }FTFY
There technically is!
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/print
Well. In browsers, anyways.
Yes, but it prints the page, so in this case it wouldn’t print anything
no it wouldn’t, because this is OCR reference language
Huh interesting. In Scotland we had another one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haggis_(programming_language)
What the heck, did someone invent a programming language, so students wouldn’t have to learn any real ones?
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)
The future is not yet young man.
hours = 0.25There. I fixed it! :)
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.
To add on to exam reference languages, this is valid ruby
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.
I forget which one, but one of my flight instructor textbooks said “to teach is to learn twice.” And BOY HOWDY is that accurate.
You will find no better teacher of expert aeronautics than a brand new student. They will show you a new perspective, every single time.
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.
For 1 hour = 4^(-1) characters
I wonder if day length is given separately in a table prior to the question? I’m not sure what they wanted except maybe seconds?
I’m assuming they wanted the literal length of the string
Naw, they wanted the metaphorical length. Computers are great at metaphors.
That seems to be the consensus.
Conversations about language aside, the error is that “Monday” is a string with a length of 6.
What is the type of the variable
daythough? As it is we have to make multiple assumptions, based on popular programming languages, about the internals of thestringtype and theprintfunction to assume that it prints “6”.That’s the variable name, not the type
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There is a fairly good chance that there has been more info presented in the class than we have been given here.
Most date libraries count to 23h 59m 59s then roll over to 00h 00m 00s. So the answer is 23 hours, not 24.
Edit: I’m big dum dum. It’s asking string length of “Monday”, thus 6.
You’re also mistaken about the time too. The first second of the day is 00:00:00 the last second of the day is 23:59:59
That’s still a full and exact 24 hours.
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.
00:00:00 is the 1st second of the day. 23:59:59 is the 86400th second of the day. That’s 24 hours.
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.
Doing the lord’s work.
I have but one up vote and you already have it.
It’s the length of the string. The number of characters is 6. It’s a play on words and a question.
I’m not really a fan of this kind of question. Especially if there’s enough questions that time will be an issue for most. Because at first glance it’s easy to think the answer might be the length of a day.
There shouldn’t be a need to try to trick people into the wrong answer on an open question. Maybe with multiple choice but not an open answer question.
I get your point about it being a trick question but I think in this case it’s pretty reasonable that you would see code like this in real life. Where the programming metaphor and your understanding of the real world clash. It’s a very important skill to be able to spot the difference.
The compiler or interpreter does that for you. There’s no point in these “gotcha’s”. They are cute brain teasers that belong on those useless “are you a programmer” quizzes you find on random meme websites, not an exam.
In the error shown a compiler would be just fine and run as usual but the person programming it would be expecting a different result so a compiler wouldn’t do this for you since it’s a logical error and not a syntax error.
If it’s a statically typed language and
xis of typeDate, it’s for sure throw a type error when trying to assign a string to it. If it had autoboxing / auto type conversion fromStringtoDate, length could return a number or a string.If this were Javascript on NodeJS, it would fail at
print(x)because that doesn’t exist in JS. If it were Python it would fail atx.lengthbecause that has to belen(x). And so on.If this were all to pass, at the latest at runtime, when the programmer sees the output “6”, they would know something’s up.
As I said, cute, but worthless test.
It relies on critical thinking (meaning thinking about your own thinking), basically, and most students aren’t very good at that.
This doesn’t rely on critical thinking. It just relies on understanding what “.length” does, which would’ve been previously covered in the lessons.
Well, both. If you rushed through without recalling that length has specific meaning relative to strings, even though you do know that, that’s a critical thinking failure. But yeah, not knowing strings could do it too.
If you didn’t know the answer, it’s a critical thinking exercise? Not at all.
Answering this question relies completely on understanding programming. A correct answer cannot be reached without an understanding of programming.
A correct answer cannot be reached without an understanding of programming.
Yes. It does not follow, though, that knowledge of programming always leads to a correct answer. Since you seem like someone who might appreciate a formal logical description, you are affirming the consequent here.
Again, without sufficient critical thinking one might just miss the detail that “Monday” is a string and not a custom unit-of-time object, inheriting from
Day.
Oh wow. Thanks
does it give reference to what language this is in?
x = string length of “Monday” => 6passed my gcse?
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.
Exactly. It’s pseudo code. It’s meant to be universally understandable, not language specific.
i’m of the belief that pseudocode should be real code that actually runs. I.E. something like bash. A scripting language.
Starting off a noob programmer in Bash… Pure evil
The first language I tried to learn as a kid was Batch scripting…
(edit: and then some VBScript along the way! Eventually worked my way to C++ though)
thats why i hate pseudocode.
I would much rather just learn an actual language, or two even. At that point.
Good thing this only uses ASCii characters, else you get into some fun discussions about UTF encoding
But does it count the null byte or not?
In most languages, length method doesn’t count the null terminator. Might result in some fun memory errors
It’s obviously:
Traceback (most recent call last): File “./main.py”, line 2, in <module> AttributeError: ‘str’ object has no attribute ‘length’
Ah yes, all pseudocode is python
Ah yes, python is psuedocode
I deduce these two sets must be the same then?
Trick question?
attribute error
Poor question more likely
I am currently looking for job opportunity and amount of gotcha type question i see in OA is just something else.
I can’t imagine that’s any fun to deal with.
“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.
Do we know it is Python?
looked into it, gcse cs uses python in syllabuses.So, most likely
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
Are they using a red pen to write the checkmarks for correct answers to make it confusing but logical at least?
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.
Nah, just using one of those handy pens with blue, black & 2 red ink. ;)
86400000print("x")is you want to screw your students.screw your students
ಠ_ಠ
“Dr. Prof. Mann, I really didn’t understand anything about UNIX on that last midterm. Can we go over how to
touchandfingerafter class?”
