After a riotous halloween party last night (100+ people over the night, lasting until 3:30) and scrubbing the house clean so that my feet no longer stick to the floor, I am really settling down to do my take-home midterm that’s due on Tuesday. We may only use our “own notes from the class, Gallager’s book, and Cover/Thomas.” It seems reasonable on the face of it, but this is a research seminar class where most of the students are doing research in the topics covered by the exam. If one were to literally follow the instructions, almost no research could be done while the exam was out, which seems pretty silly.

Then again, one of the professors for this class was also responsible for the take-home but fixed-time (3 hours) midterm my first semester here. It’s a clever way of circumventing university exam rules, but I really question its usefulness as a method for evaluating knowledge.