Editing Dartmouth BASIC (section)

===TEACH/Test System===

Some 80% of all Dartmouth students in the late 1960s took two mathematics courses and learned Basic in the second course, either in calculus or in finite mathematics.  They received two one-hour lectures on Basic near the beginning of these courses and then had to write four programs in Basic, ranging from programs for approximating π or finding a root of a quintic polynomial to programs for solving a differential equation or finding (by simulation) the limiting probability in a Markov chain.  The TEACH/Test system helped students complete these assignments.  When they thought they had a working program, they typed the command TEST, and an instructor-written program either approved what they had written or provided a hint about where they might have gone wrong.  Students were required to hand in a listing of each program, a sample RUN, and an approval from the TEACH/Test system.  The system did not grade assignments or keep a record of how many times a student typed TEST; it simply assisted students and their instructors.<ref>John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz, "Dartmouth Time-Sharing", ''Science'' 162, October 11, 1968, pages 223&ndash;228.</ref><ref>John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz, [https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED024602 ''The Dartmouth Time-Sharing Computing System, Final Report''] for National Science Foundation Grant NSF-GE-3864, June 1967, pages 9&ndash;10 and Appendix III.</ref>