Why C Language Exam Questions Miss the Point: A Critique of Overly Complex Syntax Tests

Hello, I’m Xuan Yuan. Recently I gave a companion on my planet a paid tutoring session that lasted four and a half hours and cost 675 CNY, which I gave entirely to the student.

During the session I saw some of the student’s C‑language exam questions, including two examples shown as images.

Instead of solving the questions, I want to rant about them. These exam items, much like Lu Xun’s description of a pedantic scholar obsessing over the different ways to write a single Chinese character, test only obscure syntactic details rather than practical ability.

The first example is a nested ternary expression:

(a?b?a+b:a-b:b)

It resembles a Russian nesting doll—layers upon layers. Very few serious programmers would write code like this; it is not defensive programming but rather a display of needless cleverness that only makes colleagues think the author is foolish.

The exam writers likely have never written a proper C program themselves, perhaps only learning from textbooks like Tan Hao‑qiang’s *C Programming Design*, and they equate more confusing code with higher skill.

In real software development, using more than one level of the ternary operator would be rejected in code review, and readability always outweighs flashy tricks.

These kinds of questions mislead beginners into believing programming is about mastering obscure syntax tricks, which harms their ability to solve real problems.

Programming exams should aim to cultivate problem‑solving ability, encourage readable code, and stay close to actual development practice rather than presenting meaningless “hard puzzles”.

It’s time to change the outdated approach that still dominates many university programming exams.