Reply to post: Re: The guiding principle

Yeah, we'll just take that first network handshake. What could possibly go wrong?

anothercynic Silver badge

Re: The guiding principle

I cannot support this enough - This is what I used to tell the students I used to supervise (as second/third-year student supervisor) in class too! I said "turn it in, even if it doesn't work, because I can probably look at it and see what you *tried* to achieve, and maybe it's just a small thing that broke it/would fix it".

I marked things like that too. I'd then tell them on their paper what the problem was and how to fix it (and COBOL was an utter b**** back then).

Of course, I did also spot people who would copy someone else's work (by opening Sidekick, where most people wrote their code, and then saving their own copy onto their floppy disk). Because this was an endemic problem, the first of the many identical copies I'd spot would get full marks, the one(s) after, half. If the original coder was one of the latter - Tough.

Our instructions were always "once your assignment works, and you've printed it, reboot your workstation!" so Sidekick would get nuked, and along with it any resident copies of their assignment.

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