[IP] I guess it's noto so different from using grad students ...

[Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Susan Brynteson <susanb@udel.edu>
Date: October 23, 2009 16:33:08 EDT
To: dave@farber.net
Cc: ip <ip@v2.listbox.com>
Subject: Re: [IP] I guess it's noto so different from using grad students ...

For IP--

In his email, Rich Kulawiec predicts that "an enterprising student will memorize text, take the test and dutifully reproduce it verbatim -- whether or not it actually makes any sense to a human."

Well that is exactly what happened to Midshipman Willie Keith in the classic and best-selling World War II novel, "The Caine Mutiny", by Herman Wouk.

In it, Midshipman Keith studied hard for an important exam from a military manual which he found incomprehensible.  Then, it turned out, from reading it so many times over and over and over and trying to understand it, he had, without realizing it, memorized much of it.

Come the exam, then, the question was asked, "Explain the Frictionless
Bearing", and he responded verbatim from the manual, "words which meant
no more to him than a hindu chant," says Herman Wouk.

When the results were announced, he stood first in the school, and his instructor praised him and said it had been "a brutal essay question designed to knock out all but the best".

Truth is never stranger than fiction!

                  Susan

P.S. Here's to your IP list!  It's great.



---------------------------------------
---------------------------------------
Susan Brynteson
Vice Provost and May Morris Director of Libraries
University of Delaware Library
Newark, DE  19717-5267

Phone:  302-831-2231
Fax:    302-831-1046
Email:  susanb@udel.edu



Dave Farber wrote:

Begin forwarded message:

*From:* Rich Kulawiec <rsk@gsp.org <mailto:rsk@gsp.org>>

*Date:* October 23, 2009 13:37:16 EDT

*To:* Dave Farber <dave@farber.net <mailto:dave@farber.net>>

*Cc:* Randall Webmail <rvh40@insightbb.com <mailto:rvh40@insightbb.com>>

*Subject:* *Re: [IP] I guess it's noto so different from using grad students ...*

Interesting.  I wonder how long it will be before some enterprising

student acquires a copy of the scoring program and runs a series of

experiments designed to ascertain which text corpus yields the maximum

grade, then memorizes that, takes the test, and dutifully reproduces

it verbatim -- whether or not it actually makes any sense to a human.

---Rsk

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