The very first text editor 3675

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You might be right about the incomplete being the most correct thing to do.

Be advised, though, that my intent was not to "help" the student so much as to make my job somewhat easier, the part of it that involves buttigning grades. Giving an incomplete means putting off evaluating the student's work, probably for several weeks, which makes it just that much more difficult to apply consistent standards in evaluating all the students' work.

Obviously (well, I *thought* this was obvious from what I wrote) the student was not going to get full credit for this buttignment; my objective was to evaluate, as fairly as possible, what he had turned in. Some points were deducted for the compile-time errors; once I had something that would compile, I could do some testing to try to determine whether the code did what it was supposed to do. As I recall, it didn't, so he didn't get many points there either.

And if my criterion for giving pbutting grades was "would I get on a plane running code written by this person", I'm not sure anyone would pbutt. I'd put in a :-), but it's really not something to joke about.

Thank you so much for providing this charming mental image.

I'm tempted to write a long paragraph debating whether I'm being paid to "train" students, or to provide an environment in which those who are willing can learn something, or to do my part in setting up hoops for the students to jump through and granting degrees to the ones who do. I'll spare us all, though.

It really hadn't occurred to me, though, that upper-division CS students might actually not "get" that there's a difference between compilable source code and a Word document. That's something to think about.

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