me, having deeply fallen out of the practice of writing poetry: I can’t write any more, I am now a Talentless Hack
the voice of my 11th grade journalism/12th grade creative writing teacher who rly did know everything: if you stop writing for a while the words will build up and stagnate. to clear the water, you will have to open the dam completely, and accept the fact that what initially comes out will not be palatable
Johns Hopkins Computer Science prof Professor Peter Fröhlich grades his
students on a curve: the highest score on the final gets an A and
everyone else is graded accordingly.
Clever students in Fröhlich’s “Intermediate Programming”, “Computer
System Fundamentals,” and “Introduction to Programming for Scientists
and Engineers” figured out that this meant that if they all boycotted
the exam, they’d all get As.
So they organized a boycott, milling around the hall outside the class
where the exams were being sat, sternly reminding each other that if no
one sat the exam they’d all get straight As, ignoring Fröhlich’s pleas
to come and sit the exam.
Fröhlich praised his students’ solidarity: “The students learned that by
coming together, they can achieve something that individually they
could never have done. At a school that is known (perhaps unjustly) for
competitiveness I didn’t expect that reaching such an agreement was
possible.”
I love that even the professor was like, “YES! They did good!”
He told a bunch of PROGRAMMING students that he was going to grade on a curve.
PROGRAMING.
Like half of programming is looking at sorting algorithms and asking “what could break this?” They looked at the grading algorithm (curve grading) and noticed “if every grade is the same, everything is at the top of the list” and “the easiest way to get all the grades to be the same is to set them all to zero.”
Of course the professor praised them. He may have taught them the exact type of logic that had them organize the boycott in the first place. They found a bug in his grading system and loudly exploited it.
