The very first text editor 3680

snip

snip

Indeed. You're making me think maybe I need to reconsider .... Overall I'm disinclined to give zero points when someone has made an attempt, however bad. But that may just be wimpiness on my part.

Oh yeah. I did have one really good student a few years ago who preferred to work in his room and ask me questions by e-mail -- which was not as easy for me, but it seemed to work okay, and I'd rather have them asking questions by e-mail than not at all.

I mention in another post an "office hours in the lab" thing some of us do, which seems to work well too.

snip

Yeah, that sounds about right -- and it's very consistent with some students' work habits. (Some faculty too, alas.)

Now, in the case of the Word-mangled code, I figured it was possible that the student *did* have a compilable version of the program somewhere, but for some reason had cut-and-pasted the code into Word, and that introduced errors, and given the circumstances (no real opportunity to ask for a better version) it would be worth a try .... If I remember right, though, after fixing the errors likely to be caused by Word (capitalization of variable names, spurious line breaks), it still didn't compile, and a quick skim through it indicated that -- yeah, pretty much what you describe.

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