[LAU] Exam Cheating investigation

[tim]

>> 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 ?

maybe the engineers payed too much attention on getting all the
computations right :)
errors happen, most of us are humans. the question is mainly how to
catch and avoid them: programming languages can easily do dimensional
analysis at compile-time if the dimensions are encoded into the type system.