On Sat, Jan 18, 2014 at 01:24:22PM -0500, Gene Heskett wrote: > I'm sorry if that reflects poorly on the composer of that particular exam, > but what you want, is not to test the memory of the test taker, but to test > their powers of deduction. Even so, students taking a course on the history of Western classical music should be able to identify Pierrot Lunaire without requiring internet resources. More so if during the course they had the opportunity to hear it. And I don't agree with the idea that knowledge (as opposed to the application of it) is a thing of the past. If I had to look up every equation I use on Wikipedia I'd consider myself to be a very lousy DSP programmer. > I learned to do square roots on paper, probably something over 70 years > ago, but today I'd have to use a calculator AND the answer would have to > make sense You'd be surprised to know the percentage of people that would accept *any* result from a calculator, even if it doesn't make sense at all. When I was in high school most math or physics teachers would accept an error in the calculations for an exam problem if the logic of the solution was right. But I had one who didn't. His reasoning was that if you make a stupid calculation error as an engineer, the result would be as useless as if you didn't grasp the problem at all. The bridge would collapse or the airplane would fall out of the sky. And he was right. Remember the 10^8 dollar NASA Mars probe that got lost because JPL was using imperial units while NASA expected metric ones ? Ciao, -- FA A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be an utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities. (Cory Doctorow) _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
