This conversation has, of course, veered away from the original question so I am starting afresh.
My memory of the original question is about how one sets up a test for material covered in class or associated materials for what sounds like a beginner class. I am not sure whether this would be the place for anyone to ask such a question, especially as we have no real idea what was taught and expected. Python is too rich a language and can be taught all kinds of ways including many that largely ignore object-orientedness or other ways that professionals use and appreciate. There are lots of others who have taught such classes and plenty of books. One can look to see what kinds of questions they use, and, where allowed, borrow some, suitably adjusted. Any textbooks actually used for a course may be an excellent place to start. When I have taught, I like to do things incrementally. Tests are made up based on what is talked about and stressed, perhaps with harder questions asking for some innovation. So you may end up teaching how to do some things without loops such as the example where you largely repeat some code in-line five times. You might show how to do the same thing using dreaded GOTO-statements in the OLD days but rarely now. Nowadays you might introduce while loops or their repeat/do/for variants. In Python, you may well introduce abbreviated variants such as list comprehensions. So if testing the above, it is fair to specify in a question what NOT to use. You can ask for no use of loops, or you can specify you want them to use nothing but methods X or Y and so on. And since there are so many modules out there, you might specify that no importing is allowed as that defeats the purpose. I mean, if the purpose is to teach them how to logically write a program that implements an algorithm as compared to just calling a function already made. As noted, some very decent projects are simply asking the student to create something others have already done and one way to test how well they did it is to compare the output of their work with a debugged solution. Real programmers may at some point shift to using all kinds of constructs that help them write lots of code faster and with fewer errors but beginner students need something not very low level (like assembler?) but also not very high level, I would think. But debates about object oriented are fine for us philosophers but not really of much use for the question I thought was asked. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
