Questions

This folder contains all the questions and answers for taking an exam. Each file my be named {id}.yaml, where {id} is the item id of a subject, course, or assignment.

"But wait! These answers are all in public Git Hub where everyone can see them. I could just memorize the answers!"

You can read the story of Bruce Campbell below if you want to know my rebuttal to your observation.

Bruce Campbell

Let me tell you a story. When I was in High School, our computer science/physics teacher (Bruce Campbell, at Villa Park HS) did a similar thing, but he had all the questions and answers in a text file on his protected account on an HP3000 mainframe computer at Santa Ana College. Yes, I'm aging myself. We all had user accounts and could run the test-taking practice exams, where it would ask us 20 random questions, and score us at the end. Campbell said that our final physics exam would be 20 random questions from a set of 500. Everyone would get a random different test, so you should run this practice test many times to see what you know.

One question might be "Who discovered the electron? ANSWERS: (A) Albert Einstein (B) Henri Becquerel (C) J. J. Thomson (D) Wilhelm Röntgen (E) All of the above (F) None of the above.

All questions had the same (E) and (F) answers, but (A), (B), (C), and (D) would be random for all students.

As young hackers, we thought we could do better than run practice exams all day long. So one of us distracted the teacher for help with some home work problem, and while Campbell stepped away from his logged-in terminal (a DecWriter), another person dumped out the entire text file of questions (while still logged onto his account) and quickly scurried the fan-fold paper out of the lab. We then had all 500 questions printed out with the answers. So we memorized all the answers.

Come test day, all the students got perfect answers on the test. And here's what Campbell said the next day.

This is the best day of my life! Everyone got an "A+" on this final exam. I feel like I'm the best Physics teacher of all time. Those tests were random so I know there was no cheating; copying your neighbors answers [students are secretly snickering and winking to each other]. Forgive me kids, I'm all choked up. Let me have a minute [more students snickering]. I let you all believe that you pulled a fast one on me. Do you really think that I would ever leave my terminal unlocked and walk away from it accidentally? I remember hearing the Decwriter printing in the background while I was helping that decoy student. But I just pretended not to notice. I got the entire class to memorize all 500 answers to great physics questions, like "What year did Max Plank win the Nobel Prize in Physics?" If I had printed out those questions and given them to you last week, I would have seen worse grades. But if you think you're pulling a fast one on me, then you'll study! I am definitely the best High School teacher ever!

Well, let's just say that the snickering stopped and was instantly replaced with awesome respect.

This strategy of making the test answers available to everyone up front is honoring the spirit of Bruce Campbell.