zlacker

>>jstrie+(OP)
> As a result, solutions using strings are disallowed on problem sets and quizzes until they are taught. However, the few students who have prior Python programming experience may be tempted to find digit length without loops using a variant of the following (for our purposes) invalid solution.

Wow. this is one of the reasons I hated school. No programmatic reason what given for why a string solution couldnt be used, only an arbitrary reason. Here students may have knowledge from self teaching or whatever, but they are unallowed to use that knowledge because "reasons".

To any teacher that thinks its a good idea to punish students for thinking outside the box: shame on you. All youre going to end up doing is crushing enthusiasm and/or creating drones. Please dont.

>>svnpen+Jm
In school the goal isn’t to solve the problem, but to learn something in the process of solving that problem.

Thinking outside the box is of course valuable, but the teachers have specific concept they want to teach and constraints like that help them accomplish that.

When it comes to tests, it’s not as easy. At tests it’s is more about solving the actual problem, but one could still argue that the test is meant to test how well one has learned what was thought, not to solve the problem.

I think this is totally fair in this case.