this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2024
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I think this is a good question and answer in the sense that it reveals a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of the student - exactly what you hope an exam would do! (Except for how this seems to combine javascript's .length and python's print statement - maybe there is a language like this though - or 'print' was a javascript function defined elsewhere).
This reminds me once of when I was a TA in a computer science course in the computer lab. Students were working on a "connect 4" game - drop a token in a column, try to connect 4. A student asked me, while writing the drop function, if he would have to write code to ensure that the token "fell" to bottom of the board, or if the computer would understand what it was trying to do. Excellent question! Because the question connects to a huge misunderstanding that the answer has a chance to correct.
For reference the "language" used in the exam would probably be Exam Reference Language (OCR exam board specifically, which I believe this question is from) which is just fancier pseudocode.