The undisputable truth about "coding exams"

I’m Vietnamese. I had to take a subject about Introduction to Programming back in high school, with Pascal. Do I remember how to quadruple a number in Pascal? No, of course not. I’ve recently learned about C#, not that I want to use it, it’s because it’s in my university curriculum. Do I remember how to quadruple a number, or the syntax to create an event a.k.a. delegate storing variable in C#? No either. Google for the rescue, right? Right?

Ha. It’s exam day and you are expected to recall from memory all the syntaxes those intelligent people invented, just to do the same exact thing thats engraved in your brain to a point where your blood vessels in your brain is boiling, expanding and shrinking so that it can interpret into C#. Not only your school teaches you to use WinForm in the “Basic Cross-Platform Application Programming With .NET”, they also want you to be a sole coding machine with exceptional memory of a documentation, AND intellect to suddenly knows the knitty things that they didn’t even teach.

Bottom line is, you should be ashamed to pay them to teach you these Introduction to Programming courses. The documentations exist for a reason; it’s awaiting your usage. Have you had a taste of the “coding on paper” exams?