Re: [Phys-l] 1869 MIT Entrance Exam

[Bernard Cleyet <bernardcleyet@redshift.com>]

[bc "blows his own horn".]


" -- ham radio or other high-tech hobby"


One of the interviewees in the PBS doc. on the Fuze said he always 
selected the radio hams for his development team.

bc, former W6TFE, and wonders about the imaginary world.

p.s. as a freshman at UCSB,  I suggested the PI use pulsed 420 MHz 
transmitters instead of co-ax. for his large area cosmic ray detector.  
(projected total of about 5 km of cable).  I had previously converted 
the aircraft IFF (APS-13 Id. friend /foe) for voice comm.   It used 
blocking oscillator pulse transformers.   I learned much from Elmore and 
Sands and didn't realize Matt was a coauthor 'till mentioned at his 
retirement "festschrift" colloquium from Santa Cruz!  I then had him 
autograph my copy.


John Denker wrote:

> On 10/02/2007 02:24 PM, Karim Diff asked:
>
>  
>
> > Are tests supposed to be about "real-world" situations or about whatever 
> > was done in the classroom (whether it was real-world or not)?
> >    
>
> Here's the deal:
>
> 1) School should prepare people for life in the real world (*).
>
> 2) Teachers tend (*) to teach to the test.  This can be a good 
> thing or a bad thing, depending on the test.
>
> 3) Therefore my answer is clear:  In most cases the test should 
> be representative of the real world.
>
>
> (*) with minor exceptions that we need not discuss right now.
>
>
> I've done a lot of recruiting and hiring.  I don't know how many
> times, when interviewing a candidate who had a Masters in EE from 
> an Ivy League school, I found that the guy ate breakfast on the
> complex-s plane, but didn't know how to use a soldering iron,
> couldn't explain why the switch I gave him had six terminals on
> the bottom (instead of two), and generally made it clear that he
> had never built anything in his entire life.  And the guy with
> a Masters in Computer Science could talk on and on about NP-
> completeness but couldn't get a real computer to do simple tasks.
>
> Of course it wasn't all bad;  the good candidates were really,
> really, good ... but usually on account of some non-classroom
> experience:
> -- work-study job in a research lab
> -- part-time job in industry
> -- ham radio or other high-tech hobby
> -- et cetera
>
>
> All in all, I think that unreal tests matched to unreal class
> work are a big, scary problem.
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