Thursday, December 12, 2013

Fairness in Grading: A Lesson by the Great Dijkstra

Fairness in Grading: A Lesson by the Great Dijkstra

In my another post "Beauty is Our Business: Mathematics and Dijkstra", I describe how I came to be enrolled with Dijkstra at UT Austin in the course Capita Selecta and how he and his students understood the meaning of beauty and excellence. But, my intention of taking that course in the Fall of 1988, was not as much to study the course but to have a pretext of knowing the great Dijkstra. As described in that post, I used to spend more time observing Dijkstra than preparing for passing the course. To shield myself from any adverse grade by this guru of Computer Science, I had taken the course on a non-credit basis.