June 16, 2026. A polemic arguing in favour of creative, open-ended assessment in settings where you want to select for creative, open-ended brains.

Introduction

My favourite undergraduate assignment was for a graph theory course with David Wood’s. The problem was as follows:

As opposed to the standard style of question—implement Ford-Fulkerson on this graph, prove this result about chromatic number, and so on—it felt like I could take the gloves off.

Origins