[qubex]

She’s taking an exam. Surely she should understand these things by the end of the curriculum, right? I mean, she’s just been learning them... or should have.

Besides, I don’t know what it’s like in the US nowadays, but back in my time (late 1990s, IB) the computer science curriculum took file formats and so forth as granted, and concentrated on the theoretical constructs such as Turing machines, lambda calculus, decidability, computability, and the theory of recursive functions. I remember my exam required proving the identity between a particular integral and the Euler (not Riemann) zeta function and whether it could be evaluated in polynomial time to an arbitrary degree of approximation. We had to sketch out the algorithm that would do this in terms of pseudocode.

Trying to transcode a file by changing the extension... I dunno... it seems kind of meek.

[gbear605]

Was that all covered by your first semester course? Because if so, that’s more impressive than a first semester course and MIT, CMU, or Harvard, let alone what a public school can offer.

[qubex]

That was covered by a two-year IB (International Baccalaureate) course in Computer Science running from 1997 until 1998. I attended a private school (the International School of Milan).

[gbear605]

I don’t know the IB system, but AP tests are equivalent to testing students on a first semester college class. In computer science in the US, that means basic data structures and simple algorithms, and it’s been that way for the last thirty five years at least.

[mchan889]

I generally don't like to say people are making things up, however there is a lot of mythology around how much work IB students do. I've frequently seen IB students while I was in undergrad boasting about their level of proficiency, despite it seldom being supported.

[qubex]

If you think I’m boasting about something from more than two decades ago, that’s your problem, not mine.