One of the strangest ironies in Indian education is that computer science, the very subject that has built our country’s global reputation in technology, is still assessed using pen and paper. Students are asked to write programs with a ballpoint pen in a silent exam hall, as if code were a poem or an essay. But code is not meant to be written in ink and left untested. Code is meant to be typed, compiled, run, broken, and fixed until it does what it is supposed to do. Treating programming as something that can be judged by handwriting on an answer sheet not only misses the point of the subject, but it also actively damages the way students learn and prepare for the future.
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Coding is a living process. It is never perfect on the first attempt. Every programmer, from a school student to a Google engineer, knows the reality of trial and error. You type, you run, you check, you fail, you debug, you try again. The compiler is not an enemy; it is the most honest teacher a coder will ever have, pointing out errors in syntax, missing brackets, logical flaws, and runtime failures. A pen-and-paper exam strips all this away and reduces programming to an exercise in memory.
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