Not to mention figuring out how to import it onto a Mac II...jamming that thing onto a Mac-format floppy, depending on sound format (AIFF? Maybe?) might well have been just as impressive a feat...

Well, at least they didn't have any games.

*ahem*

My high school had a peculiar relationship with computers generally. There was the computer lab, and there was the one faculty member who knew a things or two about basic BASIC programming, but then there were others teachers there who hated computers and anything related to them. I had an English teacher who genuinely believed that a "word processor" was a sort of artificial intelligence program that you could provide with your assigned topic and it would print out a completed paper thereupon.

As such, any machine-printed assignment submissions received an automatic zero from her. (I got around that by printing with a daisy wheel printer. Remember those? The output looked just like a typewriter's!)

Now, going back a few more years, my middle school was fully invested in the mid-'80s dream of a computerized student utopia. In addition to a computer lab fully stocked with Commodore 64s, VIC-20s, TRS-80s ("no bloody A, B, C, or D," as it were), TI-99/4As, and a couple of smokin'-hot, cutting-edge Atari STs everybody clamored for time on, it had TRS-80 Model IIIs liberally scattered around the place and a few of the teachers had individual Apple //es in their classrooms. The trouble being that I don't remember any of us doing anything that was actually useful with any of those computers, except for... oh, wow, there's a memory within a memory.

OK, remember Choose Your Own Adventure books? For those of you who don't, they were nonsequential children's novels where you would make decisions and then be directed to different pages to see how your choices had affected the narrative. Sort of like playing Zork in hard copy. A page would say something like,

And on page 59 you would of course die horribly and the book would invite you to go back and try something else.

(I don't think they ever had the Star Trek license, but frankly, Star Trek: Redshirt! would have been the perfect CYOA book theme, because they all had many endings like that.)

Well, there was another series of kids' books in print at around that same time, I don't remember what they were called, but they were like CYOA books, except that instead of decision gates, they had short BASIC programs at various points. The idea was that you would read to that point, key the program into your BASIC interpreter of choice, and based on the output you got, proceed to the next section of the narrative. There were even little tips about how you could optimize the programs for the idiosyncrasies of some of the most common/popular BASIC interpreters (I seem to recall the one for the Tandy Color Computer 3 usually required the most modification from the vanilla example in order for the programs to run properly).

I don't think those books ever really caught on in a big way, which is a shame, because they were a great gateway drug to programming. The CYOA/Which Way? Books format was huge in my demographic in the mid-to-late '80s, and so were little computers like the CoCo and the TI-99/4A, each of which had its own BASIC interpreter in the ROMs. (As I discovered, it was even possible with a bit of hacking to get most of the programs in those books to work on a Timex Sinclair 1000, if you had the optional 14K RAM expansion.) It really should've been a sure thing, but the fad fizzled out within a year or so.

During that year, though, almost everyone in the Nerd Stratum of the population at Millinocket Middle School could be found in the computer lab of a fifth period, either keying in a program from one of those books or sitting glumly at the VIC-20s, which couldn't run most of them, waiting for one of the other computers to open up. Even those of us who had our own computers at home (I had a //e by then) would usually save those books for lab time at school, then trade them around when we were done with them. It was a social phenomenon.

We also had better access to games in middle school. In high school the computers were always treated as SRS BSNS and playing games on them was a crime akin to playing kickball with that metal orb they use in the coronations of British monarchs, but in middle school, if we weren't screwing around on academic time and we were willing to either stick with the limited offerings available or provide our own software, we could play all we wanted with the school-owned hardware.

Mr. Brehaut, one of the science teachers, was known for being OK with people playing F-15 Strike Eagle on the //e in his room at lunchtime or after school, and there was a TRS-80 Model III in the library specifically set aside for students with free periods to play a small selection of games on (chosen, I suppose, because it had no sound hardware). You had your choice of Super Star Trek (the one from the big book of BASIC games, I forget what it was called, possibly The Big Book of BASIC Games), a deeply anonymized bootleg of Will Crowther's Colossal Cave Adventure, or Taipan.

I was briefly the hero of a jaded and novelty-hungry seventh grade for bringing in my copy of the Infocom Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for Apple, which provided a new stream of stimulation to those tired of F-15 Strike Eagle, offered a more cerebral pursuit for those not suited to the action-paced gameplay of F-15 Strike Eagle, and afforded Mr. Brehaut some relief from the sound effects of F-15 Strike Eagle. Good times.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Man, it's weird what a difference a few years makes. I entered High School in '95. At that point, the vast bulk of my teachers required that any assignment of any length be submitted on printout. My English/History teachers in particular were thrilled by the advent of the word processor, because it meant they could assign lengthier topics and didn't have to wade through hundreds of pages of badly hand-written scrawl while grading.

We also had a pretty smoking internet connection and something like fifty plus computers in the library. (My high school, for the record, was enormous; 1600 or so people.) No filter, either. It was theoretically possibly to browse porn on them (although I can't recall anyone being that shit stupid; every screen was in full view of the front desk) but as long as you didn't do that you could browse to pretty much anything you wanted. I read a lot of NXE during study hall on those things.

>Mr. Brehaut, one of the science teachers, was known for being OK with
>people playing F-15 Strike Eagle on the //e in his room at
>lunchtime or after school, and there was a TRS-80 Model III in the
>library specifically set aside for students with free periods to play
>a small selection of games on (chosen, I suppose, because it had no
>sound hardware). You had your choice of Super Star Trek (the
>one from the big book of BASIC games, I forget what it was called,
>possibly The Big Book of BASIC Games), a deeply anonymized
>bootleg of Will Crowther's Colossal Cave Adventure, or
>Taipan.

What, nobody had a copy of Harpoon? Really? I'm surprised.

>

Tangent: I am enormous, colossal fan of the actual novel Tai-Pan. It's racist as fuck, of course (oddly enough for someone who spent four years in a Japanese prison, James Clavell seems to view the Chinese as a race of barely controllable sociopaths and the Japanese as proud, honorable people) but damn, could that man write. I played the hell out of that game even though by the time I was made aware of it, actually running the damn thing was a chore and a half.

Also, when Iron Age was still in active development, I heavily considered inventing a 2030s-era member of the Struan family, living in Hong Kong, who would post on Ben Stark's blog totally in-character. You know, try to get some in-setting RP going on. Sadly, never really got around to it.

>I was briefly the hero of a jaded and novelty-hungry seventh grade for
>bringing in my copy of the Infocom Hitchhiker's Guide to the
>Galaxy for Apple,

The BBC made said Infocom game available free to play online just a couple days ago, in fact. Serendipity!

-Merc
Keep Rat

Heh. There was a filter of some sort on our connection, but being as I used the library's windows machines to telnet into The Armory><1> in order to read usenet<2>, they couldn't have told if I was reading porn or comp.lang.* without getting *really* close to the screen.

Also, it was through porn that I found EPU in the first place, so there's that.

--
-Pasha
<1> John DuBois, aka spacecdt, the runner of that machine, died a couple of years back. This made me sad.
<2> I remember having to explain to the vice principle that I wasn't "hacking" when they saw those.
"Don't change the subject"
"Too slow, already did."

Ha, you just reminded me of a thing.

In the summer of 1993, I was back in Podunk waiting for the school year to start at the University of Maine for what would end up being my second false start at college. I had an account on the IBM mainframe the University used for student computing in those days (imaginatively called maine.maine.edu, in much the same way that the Encore at WPI was called wpi.wpi.edu - this was apparently a Thing in the early '90s), and an email address generated by an automatic user addition script they ran every enrollment period (which started with "io" and then had a five-digit number starting with 3 - username customization was not a Thing in the early '90s), but I didn't have any way of using it until school started. Everything was dial-up in those days, and the University only had local dialing numbers in Orono - it would've been a toll call from the Podunk Valley, and that was plainly not on.

Except one day I was at my local library, and I noticed that they had a computer set up to talk to URSUS, the UMaine library's online card catalog, so that people could make inter-library loan requests from the various libraries on the URSUS network (which at the time were the ones on all the University of Maine System campuses and, I think, the Maine State Library in Augusta). A cursory inspection proved that this, too, worked by dialing up a modem somewhere. Operating on the assumption that there was no way the Podunk public library was going to be paying long-distance rates for catalog lookups, I figured the URSUS network must have a point-of-presence that was a local call from there.

I didn't particularly want to access URSUS from home or anywhere else, but on the other hand, I assumed the URSUS server was at the Fogler Library at UMaine, and if it was, well, maybe a person could get to the whole UMaine campus network from there. I asked the librarian on duty if he knew the phone number it was dialing in order to connect, and he eyed me narrowly and asked me why I wanted to know. I said I was interested, as a student of computer science (which, in technical fact, I no longer was) and an in-going transfer student, in how the University went about provisioning such services as compared to my old school.

"Uh-huh," he said, then shook his head. "Nope. You look like one'a them, whaddaya call 'em, whackers. I'm afraid I can't be the one responsible for giving you that kind of power."

He really said that.

I said something like well, suit yourself, and went back to the URSUS terminal to examine it further... and found, taped to the back of the case (it was one of those big honking PC XTs with the full-height hard drives), a file folder containing a sheet of instructions about what to do if the link went down or the computer crashed or what have you and you had to re-establish the connection. This did not actually contain the telephone number of the local URSUS POP...

... but the script on the PC that initialized the dialer did.

So I did what any self-respecting whacker would do, wrote it down, went home, waited for the library to close (figuring there was probably only the one phone line at the other end), and investigated further. At the time, the only computer I owned that had a modem was an AT&T PC7300 Unix PC, so I fired that up and plugged in the number.

I forget the exact details of how the resulting connection worked, but whatever was at the other end of the phone line was just a simple widget designed to relay the connection to Orono, where it went into the system that they were using to aggregate all the remote URSUS POPs onto the campus network... which happened to be a Xylogics Annex II serial comm server, the same thing WPI used for its dial-up pool when I was a student there. I knew how to talk to those (within a couple-three years I would in fact be working for Xylogics, but that's a different story), so I ignored the MOTD telling me how to connect to URSUS and asked it what else it could see. The list that came back was a long one and included a lot of stuff I neither knew nor cared about, but it also included all the Sun SPARCstations the CS department operated (which were all named after dwarves from The Hobbit) and maine.maine.edu.

I didn't have an account on the CS SPARCs at the time (that wouldn't happen until school actually started and I was able to go and prove to their operators that I wasn't going to wreck anything with my humanities-major hamfists), but I was able to spend an idyllic(?) summer basking (whenever the local library was closed, which in practical terms was most of the time) in the glories of CP/CMS and IRC via BITNET on the University's ancient-even-then IBM System/360 mainframe.

At 1200 baud.

Yessirree, they never should have given me that kind of power.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

"Shall we play a game?"

>I didn't have an account on the CS SPARCs at the time (that wouldn't
>happen until school actually started and I was able to go and prove to
>their operators that I wasn't going to wreck anything with my
>humanities-major hamfists), but I was able to spend an idyllic(?)
>summer basking (whenever the local library was closed, which in
>practical terms was most of the time) in the glories of CP/CMS and IRC
>via BITNET on the University's ancient-even-then IBM System/360
>mainframe.
>
>At 1200 baud.

Yeesh, my first dial-up was 14.4K, and that was considered a rocketship at the time. I can't imagine doing anything at 1200. Must have taken *hours*... (BBS at 14.4 seemingly took hours back then)

Jeanne

	Jeanne Hedge http://www.jhedge.com
"Never give up, never surrender!"

I've always felt that the people of the WarGames world should've been grateful that David didn't opt for Theaterwide Chemical and Biological Warfare instead.

>>At 1200 baud.
>
>Yeesh, my first dial-up was 14.4K, and that was considered a
>rocketship at the time. I can't imagine doing anything at 1200. Must
>have taken *hours*... (BBS at 14.4 seemingly took hours back then)

Well, keep in mind that what I was interfacing with was pretty bare-bones. CP/CMS was a text-only operating system from the 1960s, so it could only display a screenful of monochrome ASCII (well, technically EBCDIC, but the same limitations as to available character set) text at a time anyway. There was no file transfer or graphical widgetry, not even any color or non-ASCII-codepage-text graphics like you would get on BBSes and the like. It was slow - interfaces like that were best at 2400 baud - but not intolerable. It just meant a screen refresh took five seconds instead of two. The PC7300 was a slow beast anyway - I think the hard drive actually had a severed human hand holding a magnetic stylus for a write head* - so it wouldn't have made a ton of difference if the feed was faster.

--G.
* not really
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

When I read this last night, I was sufficiently punchy from sleep dep (I spent most of yesterday in the 3 AM field, thanks to cumulative time-change derived discombobulation) that the resulting visual, a macabre, Flintstones-by-way-of-Terry Gilliam's Brazil sort of thing, was just shy of reducing me to tears from laughter.

"Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis."
- Kenneth Boulding

And I had an INSTANT mental image of a cross between a Hand of Glory and the Thing out of the Addams Family.

...!
Gott's Leetle Feesh in Trousers!

Tangent: the names of servers is what I use, at any given place of employment, to make an initial determination about how much power the IT guys have and how chill they are.

If they're all named after characters, places, weapons, or conveyances from fantasy and science-fiction? Someone with real decision-making power is kicking it old school.

If they all have names that are bland and functional, but usefully descriptive in some way, such as using syntax that conveys the servers precise location and function in a concise and easily extendable fashion, you're dealing with people who are big on keeping their infrastructure organized and locked down. They probably take the "engineer" part of "network engineer" very seriously. Look for a guy who is clean-shaven and wearing a tie unironically.

If they all have gobbledygok alphanumeric strings, then either they are paranoid about security or you're dealing with shitty outsourcing, incompetence, a CIO whose primary qualification is that he has an MBA, or some combination of all of the above. In which case, strap in.

-Merc
Keep Rat

At UltraNet, the systems with names were named after heroes from Greek and Roman mythology. Not gods; mortal (or at least demi-mortal; there was one called herakles) mythic heroes. The NNTP server, for instance, was called aeneas. (Or, as Craig Pierantozzi, who was tasked with keeping the miserable beast running, often derisively called it in staff meeting, anus, as in, "Any other business?" "anus needs more disk again. Can we stop carrying the alt.binaries hierarchy?")

All the obvious ones were taken by the time I built the linux machine I used as my workstation during the part of the day when I wasn't on monitor duty at the Hall of Justicein the operations room, so I called it vitruvius. He wasn't actually a hero from mythology, but he was an architect, engineer, and possibly the inventor of concrete, and I think that counts.

I'm told he's also in The LEGO Movie, which is pretty badass for a Roman civil engineer.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

My canonical examples for this kind of thing are mainly from early-'90s universities, as few companies were on the Internet in any meaningful way before the Web (apart from the ones that made computers, anyway). WPI, of course, had the CCC, where everything was named after something from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension; the Math Department had another DECstation lab where they were all named after mathematicians (poincare, ramanujan, etc. - sadly there was not a lobachevsky that I can recall). Other labs on campus were more pedestrian, and at least one, the Advanced Document Preparation lab, didn't have any UNIX machines in it anyway; nobody bothered naming PCs, so they were all just identified by their NetWare ID numbers for printer queueing purposes. You had to telnet to one of the DECstations or the Encore to do anything Internetty from them anyway.

In those days you learned about the names of machines at other sites on the Internet mainly through the sender headers on USENET posts, which is how, for instance, GweepCo at WPI came to be aware of the HIP lab at Berkeley. I don't know what HIP stood for, but naturally it had the subdomain hip.berkeley.edu, and the machines were named to suit the theme. There was dislocated, broken, artificial, and my personal favorite, tragically.

Closer to home, the early GweepNet had machines called hotblack (who was spending a year dead for tax purposes), sidehack (a sport that's a little bit dumb), and my old UNIX PC was called davros (because just about as many parts of it weren't working).

There used to be a system at Denver University that pretty much anyone at any other university could get an account on. I remember a lot of us took them up on that so as to confuse people by emailing them from du.edu addresses when they thought we were in Worcester. I forget what the individual machine was called; Derek Bacon always used to insist that they should rename it menamena.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I wonder if that was a precursor to the current UC-HiPACC. Written exactly as I typed it, the acronym stands for University of California High-Performance AstroComputing Center. (website; wikipedia entry). Or possibly this?

Jeanne

	Jeanne Hedge http://www.jhedge.com
"Never give up, never surrender!"

Do you mean Nyx?

It's still around, at nyx.net.

When I was at uni, the servers were all named after Blackadder characters. The maths department's server, for example, was called Baldrick.

---

Before we were bought out, our admins used game names for the servers. So we had Halo, Halflife, etc, but my favorite by far was the system that served, among other things, as the host for our web-based time tracking system. On Friday afternoons when everyone was trying to get their time entered in, the system would bog down, and the status message at the bottom of everyone's browser said 'Waiting for Doom.' Well, Doom finally came, and it's name was IBM. =/

-Simonz never liked IBM. Now he hates it.

I was just thinking about those the other day. I was deeply into that series as a young snapper of whips, although I wasn't always patient enough to wait for computer access before jumping ahead in the book.

Wikipedia says that they were called "Micro Adventure", and there were 10 of them.

In 1979, when I was in the first grade, one of the upper-grade teachers at the elementary school I was attending at the time believed so strongly in the potential of the microcomputer as an educational tool - at a time when the people in charge of the Millinocket school system clearly did not - that he bought two of the original Radio Shack TRS-80 computers (later retroactively called the "Model I") for his classroom. And when I say "bought", I mean he paid for them himself. This was not a trivial outlay for a man on a rural teacher's salary, I assure you; Wikipedia claims that the TRS-80 started at $600 apiece when new, which is somewhere north of $2200 in today's money.

Mr. Burton taught fourth or fifth grade, so under normal circumstances I would have known nothing about this at the time; we moved across town that winter, so the following school year I was transferred to a different school. (Hard to believe that this town once had three geographically distinct K-5 schools. Two are gone now - literally, in the case of old Katahdin Avenue School, where I went from second grade to fifth; the town tore it down a few years ago rather than keep maintaining the building. But I digress.) The thing was that my mother worked for the school at the time, as the "gifted & talented" teacher, and as she was big into educational innovation as well, she and Mr. Burton were on the same page as regards the potential of microcomputing (and the frustrating blindness of the administration to same). She used to work with him on various projects his students and hers could do with the machines after school, and lacking any better ideas, I would go down there and hang around.

So Mr. Burton's TRS-80s were probably the first microcomputers I used, and although I remember little enough of first grade clearly, that holy-shit-look-at-that sensation from running that first absurdly simple BASIC program everyone attempted in those days,

10 PRINT "HELLO";
20 GOTO 10

remains with me still.

Like I say, I thought about going that far back in the Elder Days Story Time post, but I decided that it was straying rather far afield from the original point, inasmuch as I even have one, so I filed it away for some later date. Just now, I was thinking about it again, and decided to see if Google could tell me what ever became of Mr. Elliot Burton, who moved away many years ago to seek greener pastures in better-funded, less-stupidly-administered school districts.

And it did. It told me, in fact, that he died.

Yesterday.

As coincidences go, that is more than a little bit creepy.

Rest in peace, Mr. Burton. You were the only sonofabitch in that headquarters knew what he was tryin' to do.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I had a very similar experience, only it was about five years later and it was on my dad's "Osborne" luggable that he bought for WordStar (remember WordStar?) but which came with all sorts of weird stuff. Such as a FORTH interpreter, and this book, which explains that rather peculiar language with cartoons. At one point, having just told you how to write a loop, the book suggests that you type

1000 0 DO CR ." I'M GOING LOOPY!" LOOP

"Go on, execute it! How often do you get to tell anyone to do something a thousand times?"

>Just now, I was thinking about it again,
>and decided to see if Google could tell me what ever became of Mr.
>Elliot Burton, who moved away many years ago to seek greener pastures
>in better-funded, less-stupidly-administered school districts.
>
>And it did. It told me, in fact, that he died.
>
>Yesterday.

Aw man. You have my sympathies.

I grew up (and still live, actually) in Oregon in the same era. Not playing Oregon Trail was never an option.

I got started in middle school, somewhere around '82 or '83; the library had a little room near the back with two Apple IIs. I still have, at last check, the very first 5.25" floppy I ever bought and used (though it now requires nearly-as-ancient tape to hold it together, of course, and I wouldn't want to actually put it in a drive.) When I moved to Eugene in '84, the high school had a typing classroom split between Selectrics and Apple //es, and soon acquired an actual computer lab with a few more //es and a whole lot of //cs. I spent a lot of time there.

Games we played... Spinnaker Software titles, "Microbe, the Anatomical Adventure" (based on Fantastic Voyage, with a manual thick enough to choke a moose - effectively doubling as copy protection, as good luck trying to play it without the lists of drugs, maps of the circulatory network, etc), Pinball Construction Set, Eamon adventures, and various trifles we coded ourselves or passed around; one enduringly popular one was called "Warlords II" and was a basic (written in BASIC, even) artillery game, with the variables being angle, power, prevailing wind and random terrain between the two gun-towers.

A friend had an Apple at home as well, and he got me into Rescue Raiders (later updated for PCs and Macs as Armor Alley), Wizardry, et al. The best I could do was a VIC-20, though I did eventually get (and still have, in my closet) an Apple ][+.

Oh man, In Search of the Most Amazing Thing. The longest shaggy-dog story ever written for the Apple //e. :)

>enduringly popular one was called "Warlords II" and was a basic
>(written in BASIC, even) artillery game, with the variables being
>angle, power, prevailing wind and random terrain between the two
>gun-towers.

Sounds like a prototype of Scorched Earth.

And by 1990 we all had that one slightly twitchy friend who had an Amiga and would threaten to cut anyone who didn't acknowledge that it was superior to all others, right? Those of us who weren't that guy ourselves, anyway.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Michael C. Fortner
"Maxim 37: There is no such thing as "overkill".
There is only "open fire" and "I need to reload".

No...

I had a VIC-20. :)

Ah, yes...if memory serves me correctly those would be the Micro Adventure series of books. You were a kid who was so good at computers, you were a part-time secret agent. How did you receive your orders? They were (according to the story) hidden in the latest issue of X-Men, which your character had the handy decoding sheet for.

My brother and I used to love going to the library to play with the Apple II computers there. Since he was the first one to take a typing class, he volunteered to enter the programs from said books. Ah, memories...

Of course, when I took Basic I in high school, I still had some of those old programs. One of the games from Micro Adventure (where you had to control an "O" which was your sphere and fire "spears" at sharks) ran rampant in the computer lab. Sadly, the text in those things was easily mangled...from "Congratulations, you have defeated the sharks" to something a bit more in line with what high school kids would say.

I just remembered...back in elementary school, the Apple II's were wheeled in and out of a vault. Internet? We didn't have any stinking internet!

Ye gads. How far we've come.

I'm going to stop now.

--Doc

It was that way back in the days of elementary school at Garret Park Elementary school... and in 5th, 6th grade, I was the one doing the wheeling to and from the library's storage room. And helping with the rudimentary computer club.

--- Philip

	Philip J. Moyer Contributing Writer, Editor and Artist (and Moderator) -- Eyrie Productions, Unlimited CEO of MTS, High Poobah Of Artwork, and High Priest Of the Church Of Aerianne -- Magnetic Terrapin Studios "Insert Pithy Comment Here"

Inconsistently, and processed by an office full of surly types who cling, barnacle-like, to whatever bit of power over the faculty they have?

(I had the job of delivering and retrieving scantrons from the relevant office in one of my semesters as a teaching assistant in grad school.)

Please, god, tell me that you were a TA in a public school as part of some sort of externship or something. I know that it isn't entirely uncommon, but whenever I hear of genuine for-real collegiate level courses using multiple-choice scantron-style tests I just want to weep for the state of higher education.

-Merc
Keep Rat

The intro-level classes with 150 students often use scantrons for the exams, because when you're teaching three sections of that plus two classes which require actual manual grading of advanced (300-level) exams, and they're classes everyone in the business school has to take, it's just not practical otherwise.

That said, this particular class used scantrons for about half the exam questions -- the rest were written and graded by me, the professor, and the other TA sitting around in an empty classroom. (Oh, and that doesn't count the part done on the computers in the lab.) In our department, the intro classes were, depending on the professor, either had exams by scantron, or straightforward and easy-to-grade written ones; the more advanced classes (the ones people taking a minor or major in economics would take) had more involved exam designs.

Also, multiple choice doesn't mean easy, as I can attest personally. Hell, even in the scantron exams, most of the professors had a standing policy that if you could make a good argument for your putative wrong answer, they'd give back partial credit if you had sufficiently solid reasoning.

They're also not used exclusively for coursework in all settings. The University of Maine uses Scantron forms for the mandatory course evaluation at the end of each semester, too, which presumably some hapless workstudy drone at whatever they're calling the Office of Professional Standards these days has to collect from all the department offices and go run someplace.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

This is true enough on a practical level, but it's worth noting that I also have a great deal of contempt for lecture courses that size. If a subject has sufficient academic value that it is worth making every single student attend a course on it, then it is of sufficient value to warrant a class size of 25 or so, just like the "advanced" courses do. Putting 150 students into a lecture hall makes an intense mockery of the entire idea of an engaged student body; were those students to actually all try and engage with the materiel and the instructor, nothing would actually get done. It's assuming people are just going to sit there passively, which is not what collegiate education is supposed to be about.

(I am aware that, as a practical matter, higher education is grossly underfunded and that schools that don't have Ivy-level endowments to draw upon often have to make do. It doesn't make me approve of the situation at all, tho.)

>Also, multiple choice doesn't mean easy, as I can attest
>personally.

Oh, I can agree with that. I have a couple low-level professional certifications that involved some multiple-choice tests that required really rigorous studying on my part.

But while not easy, it does make things easier. I've rarely encountered a multiple-choice question that I thought wouldn't have been substantially improved as a short-answer.

That said, despite an intense interest in pedagogy, I am far from an expert in the subject.

-Merc
Keep Rat

Bless.

--G.
That's standing in for a much longer post containing much fruitier language.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Also: buy your teachers some drinks, kids. Lord knows they need'em.

-Merc
Keep Rat

I don't understand the mentality of ultra-right wing Republicans (any more than I do the bat-shite crazies on the left). But their seemingly universal hatred of higher education really leaves me puzzled.

Ok, it doesn't. But in deference to Ben's general desire to avoid discourse on crazed political hacks, I won't go there. :)

Brian

You're quite right in divining that I don't want to go there, but I will just note that in Governor LePage's case, it rather transcends "politics" as such. Paulie is... sort of his own deal. The thing with him is that he hates poor people, because he used to be one, and clever people, because he can never be one.

The worst part is, thanks to the Constitution of the Great State of Maine, he'll probably be re-elected this fall. The way the election is shaping up, it looks very much like we'll have a repeat of what happened to put him in office in the first place. There'll be the Democratic candidate, and then there'll be the yoyo who didn't get the Democratic nomination and declared himself an independent candidate instead of bowing out, and there might even be a more moderate Republican who does likewise, and between the two or three of them they'll soak enough of the Not Fuckstick vote that Fuckstick will get back in with a plurality no greater than 40 percent, thanks to the imbecilic way gubernatorial elections work in this state. (He pulled 37 percent in 2010.)

Sigh.

Let's talk about something fun. Anybody else see the Australian Grand Prix? (New thread for that, if you did.)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

We could split the difference, and talk about Rob Ford instead of Paul LePage! That's fun, in sort of an "Oh, Canada. You've always been the good son. What went wrong? Do you... do you need a hug?" kind of way.

-Merc
Keep Rat

Pfffff.

His most recent headlines were good for a laugh, if only because I enjoyed the self-rightepus hypocrisy of people being shocked, shocked, to find evidence that a Notorious Drunkard was drunk on St. Patrick's Day.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I just dug this old thread up in the search results for one of the other stories told in the course of it, and figured I should note for those of you who are keeping score of home that this is exactly what happened. It was even the same yoyo declaring independent and making sure LePage got elected as it was in 2010. I hope Paulie sent Eliot Cutler a nice fruit basket. I know I'd like to send him one. One piece of fruit at a time, at a range of about 15 feet, after they've had a few weeks to get good and ripe.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

A noble ideal, and one utterly defeated by the realities of public university budgets and constraints. This is particularly true for the economics department (among others); because of the high demand for PhD economists outside of academia (IIRC, some 40% of econ PhDs positions outside of colleges and universities), they tend to command higher salaries than most other disciplines, often by a substantial degree. Because my alma mater is a public institution in North Carolina, and the faculty are therefore government employees, their salaries are a matter of public record, I know for a fact that there are non-tenured (not even tenure track, in fact) faculty making more than senior, tenured professors in many other departments at the same university.

There are a number of reasons I decided not to stay on to pursue a doctorate, and the above is part of it. I mean, yes, if I were fortunate enough to land in a tenure-track position at a research university, I would stand to do quite well, but my alma mater's econ PhD program is still pretty young, and it's unlikely that I'd get such. (The main reason is that I'm quite happy where I am, mind.)

Oh, absolutely. On a practical level, doing that sort of thing is completely necessary.

It doesn't mean I have to like it, tho. Also, I have noticed that there's a tendency among university admin types to drink their own Kool-Aid; you can rarely publicly get away with saying "there are a whole bunch of aspects of our college that are sub-optimal," so you end up with spin. And then that spin is quickly internalized, so you wind up with people defending functional necessities as positive goods.

(This phenomenon is far from confined to academia, of course.)

>This is particularly true for the
>economics department (among others); because of the high demand for
>PhD economists outside of academia (IIRC, some 40% of econ PhDs
>positions outside of colleges and universities), they tend to command
>higher salaries than most other disciplines, often by a substantial
>degree.

True, although there can be some soul-selling involved. I have a friend who got his econ PHD and, thanks to his dual citizenship, landed a gig at the Fraser Institute, north of the border. Being relatively convinced of the validity of the Chicago School (positions he has since wildly reconsidered, I should note) and being both politically and policy oriented as opposed to a pure researcher, you'd think he'd have been a good fit for the place.

Let's just say he and his colleagues had different ideas about how a responsible person advances their political and policy preferences, as did... many of the other institutions in the private sector he explored. What he really wanted to do was work for the CBO or OMB, or as a troubleshooter for the UN like his father had. 'Course, everyone with an econ PHD who isn't interested in a giant paycheck wants to do that. He eventually ended up teaching, which he enjoys, but still.

>Because my alma mater is a public institution in North
>Carolina, and the faculty are therefore government employees, their
>salaries are a matter of public record, I know for a fact that there
>are non-tenured (not even tenure track, in fact) faculty making more
>than senior, tenured professors in many other departments at the same
>university.

I'm reminded of the old truism that the highest paid public employee in any given state is almost always a coach of some sort, usually of football. (Although currently in my own state, it's a Professor of Neurosurgery and Dean of Medicine; in our hosts state, it seems to be the Dean of a Law School.)

-Merc
Keep Rat

S.

I recall a scandal with scantron machines (or perhaps a off-brand version thereof) about the time I was in junior college.

It seems that the scoring machine marked a question as right or wrong depending on if the "hole" for the correct answer was filled in. What it didn't do was check if any of the incorrect holes was filled in.

It didn't take the students very long to realize that, if you filled in all the holes, you'd get every question right... :)

Yes, in practice a solid-black answer sheet is something that would eventually be spotted by even the dullest TA; it was more along the line of a "cool hack" than a practical method of cheating. But it really makes you wonder about the rocket scientists that built--and tested--the scoring machine.

("Brain surgery? Not exactly rocket science, now is it?")

Hanlon's razor tells us never to attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence*, but I've always thought there was another layer to the problem that it left unexplored, and that is one should rarely attribute to incompetence that which can adequately be explained by indifference. :)

--G.
* canonically, "stupidity", but I think "incompetence" is a better fit for the actual sentiment expressed
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.