>My best "in the lab" example of this is one of my final 4th year labs we >had to put together a circuit, and a person came to me, very >intelligent, not sure about 4.0 GPA, but probably one of the best >students in the class, and asked me which end of a diode was the >cathode... > >4 years of lectures, quizzes, exams and many labs, and something as >simple as the little line on a diode was still something they didn't >know. At one company I worked for, we had a simple little test we would give to prospective employees, both engineers and techs. Well, before we got bought by Honeywell and their HR dept made us stop. I guess the tests were unfair to stupid people. But anyway, the tests had rather simple questions on them, such as basic opamp circuits, resistor dividers, etc. One set of questions had a sine wave fed into a simple diode circuit, and you had to draw the output waveform. Really basic stuff. But it was amazing how many recent college grads couldn't answer them correctly! What was more amazing is that we found that the test was really a very good way to filter out the duds, and find the kids who actually *understood* what they were taught. It separated them out from those who were good as memorizing answers but didn't grasp what they were supposedly learning. I wish I still had a copy of the test. -- --- Chris Smolinski Black Cat Systems http://www.blackcatsystems.com -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist