OK…
so here’s a funny story about those slide rules…
My Pop had one he used his whole life at the Carolina Missile Factory…
so I was ‘familiar’ with them…
Because of that, when I arrived at NCSTate in ’72…
I established my ‘academic HQs’ in Tompkins Hall…
A month later, I ended up representing the School of Liberal Arts on the Student Senate…
that’s another story all in itself, but I won’t digress…
The biggest thing I remember that the Student Senate did that year was to BUY 300 TI Calculators @ something like $500 ea — and those are ’72 dollars so you young guys can adjust that to about 6 weeks of 40 hrs work at minimum wage today….
The ‘idea’ was to set up a program for students who couldn’t afford them to rent them by the day for exams… WHEN the Professor would allow calculators on exam day….
Truth is that idea worked great for about 2 and half years…
The next year, the Student Senate voted to auction those off to whoever still wanted them used Calculators and cash out…
Calculators had gotten cheap…
Professors had given in up the slide rule and…
doubled down on the degree of difficulty of their exams…
By that time, I had set up another office what’s now called the College of Management, I think… Been in business, one way or the other, ever since….
Three years after I graduated from NCState, those guys built their first PC in a garage…
Two years later LOTUS123 took over the spreadsheet world…
I’ve always asked myself… “What IF we could have used Lotus123 on B-school finals?”
The answer has always been the same…
The Professors at NCState would have quadrupled down on the degree of difficulty of their exams.
And FWIW… I love ‘engineers’, just didn’t want to be one…
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Now, if you don’t mind…
Back to ‘Blue Books’ back in the day…
The was nothing scarier than to walk into the room for an exam in Winston or Tompkins, get your Blue Book and sit down…
The Professor walked into the room, smiled stupidly at you and wrote TWO questions on the chalk board, turns and said…
“Ya’ll pick ONE! and be finished in 1 and 1/2 hours.”
Open book would NOT have worked in that environment.
POP!!!
