The very first text editor 3665

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I'm glad you're not in charge of hiring and firing decisions in my department, then. This is someone who has been teaching beginning programming with apparent success for, oh, I think a couple of decades at least. I wouldn't use his method of grading programming buttignments, but if it works for him, fine. He does ask for machine-readable source code in more advanced courses.

I suspect -- but this is a guess -- that this man also thinks of the intro clbutt as an attempt to teach *something* about programming to everyone who signs up and makes an effort, rather than as a way to weed out the weaker students. Presumably final grades in the course reflect what the students have actually learned; if that's the case, then it seems to me that it's reasonable to be fairly lenient in grading early buttignments, so students who don't catch on immediately don't just give up. If they never catch on, okay, fail 'em, but something I've noticed in other courses is that for some students the mental light bulb doesn't come on until midway through the semester, and why not encourage them all to stick around ....

(Am I in flame-bait territory yet?)

-- B. L. Mbuttingill ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.