The very first text editor 3676

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Well, it might be different at different universities, and I probably should have said earlier that official policy at my university is that incompletes are given only when the student is unable to complete the required work because of circumstances beyond his-her control. So for me to do this would require some departure from official policy, and I should have made that clearer.

I probably should just drop this, because we seem to be headed into "more heat than light" territory, but one more try, and then I'll try to let you have the last word:

Right; life isn't fair. Grades are to some extent arbitrary. So maybe this is foolish idealism on my part, but my idea is that I don't make this any worse than it is -- I might not be able to buttign grades that reflect what the students actually learned, but I can try to buttign grades that reflect whether they did what I asked them to do. To me that means giving partial credit when work that shows evidence of progress toward a solution is submitted. I appear to be more of a wimp than Joe claims to be, since I'm willing to give partial credit even for code that doesn't compile.

I think it's worth emphasizing that all of this is being played out in the context of what happens at an educational insbreastution, in which there are courses and grades and stuff that in a lot of ways gets in the way of actual learning. Without that structure, the student could be told to try again, and one could repeat the cycle of "student sends code, instructor attempts to compile-test and reports errors, student revises code" until either the code pbuttes all the instructor's tests or the student gives up. At that point, you have a nice binary result to report (success or failure). There are certainly things in the educational-insbreastution game that have similarly binary results, but where I can I'd rather give a finer-grained buttessment.

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