Hello.

Unfortunately, (written) midterms are necessary in most university CS programs in the world. They tell us how well our students (and ourselves as teachers) are doing. Needless to say, designing midterms for a C Programming Language course is not easy. For instance, when we do program for real, we have a myriad of information at our disposal: websites, books, cheat sheets to "remember" the syntax and so on.

My question is this: did you find any way, during your years at school or training, where you said: ok, this midterm evaluation of my programming skills is tough, but fair.

For instance: I found "find 5 problems with this code"-type questions hard but interesting and telling.

Are there any others?

Thanks.