In this episode, we talk with Dan Garcia, a teaching professor at UC Berkeley in the EECS Department. He was selected as an ACM Distinguished Educator in 2012 and ACM Distinguished Speaker in 2019. He has won all four of his department’s computer science teaching awards.

Our conversation focused on designing exams, which he boiled down to his five-finger rule: (1) material coverage, (2) reasonable time, (3) range of difficulty, (4) variety of question types, and (5) ease of grading.

His “something awesome in computer science” highlighted his mentors Mike Clancy and Brian Harvey, who are both emeritus teaching professors at UC Berkeley. Mike taught him about having a variety of question types on his exams. While Brian taught Dan his philosophy about grades and grading in general.

Dan’s Too Long; Didn’t Listen (TL; DL) summarized this five-finger rule into an excellent short sound bite.

See the transcript on the website (https://csedpodcast.org/blog/season1_episode2/)