Talk:2385: Final Exam

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 21:55, 14 November 2020 by MAP (talk | contribs) (Added a personal anecdote to the comments. Not very relevant, but relates a similar real-world event.)
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Perhaps add a note about how multiple people trying to achieve the same goal would be impossible, so therefore it would be a test of game theory to see how the final grades end up. You'd want to be the last one to make all the changes. 162.158.107.197 23:51, 13 November 2020 (UTC)

It's a contest to hack the grades and to lock out all of the other students from making further changes. BunsenH (talk) 00:49, 14 November 2020 (UTC)

Title text seems to be a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guess_2/3_of_the_average. Anonymous3 (talk) 01:10, 14 November 2020 (UTC)

The current "change every fifth answer to the bubble below it" explanation appears to make the implausible assumption that the exam is multiple-choice. BunsenH (talk) 03:19, 14 November 2020 (UTC)

Clearly the optimal solution for both courses is to change the grade to be out of 0, thus a score of 0 being a perfect score and also meet the requirements for Game Theory. 162.158.165.54 03:28, 14 November 2020 (UTC)

great idea! i was considering adding fake students to be statistical extremes but your solution allows all students to ace both courses. ocæon (talk) 14:46, 14 November 2020 (UTC)

OMG I want so much to take this class, what an excellent final exam!172.68.65.208 05:09, 14 November 2020 (UTC)

I think the explanation above is largely correct, but I assumed this was a Zoom reference. Since during lockdown the many students she is addressing should be experiencing this through a remote meeting, for which Zoom is often chosen (I'd love an explanation as to why THAT is). Zoom has notorious security flaws which any cybersecurity student should be failed for accepting. --162.158.159.96 05:11, 14 November 2020 (UTC)

What if they run it in sandboxed virtual machine? -- Hkmaly (talk) 20:45, 14 November 2020 (UTC)

No mention of Bobby Tables? Gvanrossum (talk) 06:29, 14 November 2020 (UTC)

That was a mom intentionally hacking multiple systems. Not just school, but also population census systems. This is limited to a single test. 141.101.98.38 21:08, 14 November 2020 (UTC)

the zero length exam reminds me of 'zero day' exploits, the students have zero time to respond to the exam requirements before the conclusion of the exam. ocæon (talk) 14:39, 14 November 2020 (UTC)

I feel like Randall missed a golden opportunity for Danish (instead of generic Ponytail) to prof these classes — this seems right up her alley. TPS (talk) 16:17, 14 November 2020 (UTC)

1) Hack my Cybersecurity grade, 2) Hack the professor's computer to remove the requiring link to the grade in the other course. -Diana

There is exactly one Nash Equilibria if you set the utility function to be the sum of the cyber security grade and the game theory grade. And it would be to give yourself a 100% in cyber security - Philip Geißler

This cartoon reminded me of a programming class I took as a Freshman at MIT (Spring 1974) where the first lecture described the way the programming projects were submitted and automatically graded. "Some of you may be considering finding a way to hack the grading program to just give you a good grade. This is an acceptable way to pass this course, since it is our analysis that subverting the grading program in this way demonstrates mastery of the subject matter." OK, I know this isn't a comment about the comic, but I lust felt like tossing it in. And more relevant (possibly) was the fact that being the last semester the course was taught, the final exam questions were all inside computer programming jokes. MAP (talk) 21:55, 14 November 2020 (UTC)