MCQ Thoughts

Feb 12, 2014 • Patrick Marsh

I’ve spent the better part of the last two weeks (and some time prior) trying to come up with a MCQ that is related to the goals of SWC, namely that the question is related to computer science. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to do so. This post is a collection of my thoughts from the past two weeks in hopes that someone might have some suggestions/help…

I keep coming back to the three different types of people: the novice, the competent practitioner, and the expert. Based on all that’s been presented so far, I find myself becoming self-aware. I’m cognizant of that I’m not an expert, and as such, I find myself struggling to try and place people in “bins”. In other words, how do I know if I’m overestimating my own knowledge? I know that I’m not an expert in any aspect of computer science, so how does one prevent his or her self from falling into the Dunning-Kruger Effect “trap”? I don’t necessarily agree deep down, but I keep convincing myself that in order to create a good MCQ that one must be an expert, otherwise you could easily be overplaying just how useful a particular MCQ is at assessing the distinction between a novice and a competent practitioner.

Yeah…I’ve managed to wrap myself up into all sorts of knots…

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Well, I don’t know how useful this is, but it stems from problems that I deal with a lot…

Question:

MCQ (novice/practitioner):
Ryan has a list of temperature data for a given location, with many values repeating. Which data type guarantees all values are unique?

a. array
b. list
c. set
d. tuple

MCQ (learn material):
Ryan has a collection of unique numbers that correspond to observed temperature values recorded during the month of January. Ryan also has a collection of numbers that correspond to the number of times that unique temperature value occurred. What data type would allow a user to combine these two collections in a manner that would allow a user to quickly lookup the number of times a given temperature was observed?

a: dictionary
b: list
c: set
d: tuple

Exercise:
The following code snippet fails when executed. Modify a single line of the code snippet to allow the code to run.

=====
grades = (“A”, “B”, “B”, “F”)
grades[3] = “A”
=====