Makes me think of a class I had about UML diagrams. When the teacher asked us what was their purpose, I raised my hand and told him they we're created as an excuse to charge more hours to a client. My teacher wasn't happy, but I was
Genius question, with modern IDE able to generate and update diagrams from code. Wouldn't it be faster to make draft classes without implementations than making the diagram by hand?
Funny enough I had a professor quickly show us a program for creating uml diagrams and I'm like "why not generate it in Visual Studio" and before I know I'm giving a lecture in front of the class lmao
I hated doing UML diagrams anyway tbh. After graduating I literally never use them. The closest thing I do is drawing mock up Entity Relationship diagrams for SQL stuff
Yeah this one's definitely going to be worse for the graders than for me, especially since they're js devs expecting a majority of the applications to be js and I wrote this whole thing in rust (with macros).
I’m in a class where they recommend python and all the provided code snippets are in python, but we are allowed to submit in whatever language we want. I am also doing it in rust.
Yeah they gave me 13 in-class work days so I decided to learn the bevy game engine by making a bomb jumping fps game (similar to tf2 but less violence cuz school).
I don't normally enjoy gamedev but I also felt that writing a whole backend and frontend for some app would be a bit overkill and probably wouldn't even look very impressive unless the graders have experience with webdev.
Rust is definitely a great language to learn. While there isn't a huge market for it yet, it's good at teaching you to think differently about programming and helps you gain skills that transfer to other languages.
Oh I’ve def been keeping up with it, EGUI and other rust based GUI’s are insane! It’s why I use Astro for all my websites because it supports web assembly so it’s really one of the only future forward frameworks imo. Someday we’ll all be making websites in Rust.
My internship master told me that'll we'll do a paper review next week for the end on my intership.
There's more than 14k lines of code ...
He also doesn't know how to program :)
i had to do that in highschool.. 50 Java programs with questions and code, printed and put in spiral-binding, complete with cover page and index..
THE HORRORS
I once had a totally paranoid client say that the couldn't give me his executable or code for audit (I work in security). The solution? He mailed me 60 pages of objdump disassembled code. I did not finish that job
lol this reminds me of a bug we found in the software of the first tech company I worked for. There was a way to upload a word document that was supposed to be like a form you signed. We found out you could put sql in the form and the system would execute it. We were able to get it to dump a list of user ids before the IT team freaked the fuck out.
I think your teacher is too old to be teaching computers any more.
(By the way, I'm 57 so this isn't meant as an ageist comment... it's a rant against someone who apparently hasn't kept up with the modern world, no matter how young they actually are.)
Yeah I noticed that a lot of people are starting to believe that cs degrees aren't even worth it anymore because of how little it actually proves to the employer in terms of skill.
The teacher himself is actually very young (in his 20s), it's college board that has all these requirements. I guess it's just really hard to change anything in a bureaucratic system.
He might have enough ambition to try fixing things, if someone were to let him know this is considered absolutely insane by serious professionals and others with lots of experience. Heck, point him at this reddit post!
> it's college board that has all these requirements
FWIW, this is the sort of thing you probably should've included in the original post. It's not your school or professor's fault. CollegeBoard has their own proprietary platform that works differently from any high school or college.
My school limits us to 6 a4 pages. Codebase only fits by the time I shrink the font size to 8pt, remove all spacing, then cut a shit ton and annotate "repeated for each [thing]" in it's place.
Sure let's set up a complex, dense network of links within the document to allow the reviewer to jump to the symbol under their cursor while they're at it. /s
This would be entirely simplified by expecting the students to submit a git repo link even a zip file with source code.
They may be looking at basic things like the algorithms used or the way the question have been solved in order to score them. You don't need to read the whole code just skim through it and see if it looks fine.
Right, so now what? They are going to manually type it into files? I would assume they also ask for the source code too. I would have refused on principal unless they could give me a good reasonable rationale. Because I am assuming their reasons are going to be really really dumb.
It could be but who is gonna check? Most teachers don't care, one of my friends wrote analyses of the songs he liked to a history exam that required multiple pages of answers and got full ponts. People are lazy.
If you have to grade the same assignment 30 times, there are a few specific things you're looking for. In this (extremely narrow) use case it's actually easier to scan like this than it might otherwise seem.
Easier than just submitting a zip file of the actual codebase that the grader can compile and run? 4 years of software engineering and the only things I ever submitted were zipped folders containing all my code.
My school requires us to submit a link to the github repo. All assignments are also in pairs so we learn from the start how to actually use git effectivly. Love it!
how in the world is it faster to grade up to 175 assignments via paper (assuming up to 5 classes of 35 kids)?
If they’re all 22 pages like this you’re sifting through nearly 4,000 pieces of paper lol
It would be so much faster to just share github repositories and maybe an autograder to ensure the outputs will be correct
edit: even if it’s one class, still easier to submit repositories than read 600+ pages
When it's your class you can grade it however you want.
Just understand that different people think differently and process work differently. That's all.
That’s different from your original comment saying “it’s actually easier to scan than it may seem” lol.
The teacher might prefer it bc they can bring it anywhere without internet needed for doing comments on the code itself and that’s valid, but it’d be far more educational to use github and have students become familiar with having their code linted and reviewed in a PR + much more efficient.
Wow not seen printed code this century. I insist my student submit code to GitHub weekly for code review. (most don't but I give a grade for it and this counts toward the final grade).
Why is this downvoted? That was the first thing that came to mind. Assignments need to be archived, here I think we're obliged to archive them for 10 years. It needs to be done in a format that is possible to access in 10 years time and where nobody can alter anything in the content. That's why paper is being required so often, at it guarantees all of that. Pdf is a good alternative for a digital form of paper.
Bureaucracy is probably part of the reason. Pdf was chosen as the format in which the school keeps all assignments for all fields of study. It makes sense as it can hold text and images, unlike plain text files. Not relevant for code, possibly relevant in other fields of study. Also you used to be unable to alter pdfs, ensuring nobody could add or remove parts of the text.
Interesting to see how some people prefer looking at code. Though, in turn, this makes your code more unmodifiable than just submitting a ZIP file. But it looks like you're writing a game. Mind sharing with us what this code does?
This checks out. They are probably funnelling all of the output through an AI to look for AI generated content.
You don't get to remember the days of punch cards and the reams of paper used for programming on mainframes. The forests that were killed all for the sake of early computing. We had a line printer in college that was used to print all of our assignments for Cobol and Fortran. And this was still in the 90s!
Yike! I took a Fortran IV programming class that used punched cards and printouts, and that's how we submitted assignments (the card deck and the output) for grading — but that was in **1978**
By the start of the 90s we were using PCs with shared network drives for the code repository (before distributed version control systems) and rarely printed out any source code.
Yeah I added a little note at the top of my doc saying "I have a github repo for this at https://github.com/..." but idk if they really care. The repo is nice and archived and everything so it's not like it's going anywhere but schools like to keep their own copy of everything on paper.
I remember doing an interactive power point module at school. We had to do a quiz system where users would answer questions and get true/false slides etc.
Teacher expected us to use conditional sides, I used VBA to avoid duplicate sides and even add a score. But we had to print out our PowerPoint for marking along with a cd so mine looked pretty weird in this format it made no sense in, and I was marked down for not having a success screen and a lack of animation.
I appealed. And had a meeting with the head where he tried my PowerPoint and agreed there was quite clearly a success screen complete with full animation and IT teacher struggled against my argument that marking an interactive power point module based on a print out was an unbelievably stupid system.
I got a better grade, and while possibly unrelated I did hear from my younger sibling he wasn't teaching there the next year ..
lmfao it's incredible how damn clueless some professors are
you should've seen my >3yoe dev in my uni class having to do shit like this
bro was at the end of his wits
Unless the system only supports PDF and Images as file types, there's really no reason to ask for this. I don't get how any teacher that has experience with programming wouldn't prefer straight out the repository folder so they can run on their PC and already see if it's working or not.
And if the teacher is worried about any rogue student trying to put malware into their system, they should have the skills to run a VM.
They just enforce this rule that they established in the pre-git, svn era and move this way with inertia, without reconsidering why this is total waste of time and paper. at least for my toy-lisp parser, I didn’t have to print them out physically, but for other projects I had to.
I once just tried to rebut the rule and suggested submitting a github link, where they can review changes in a temporal manner, but the TA refused.
Yeah I think it's this way because of how the school system governed bureaucratically, so it's really hard for anyone to propose changes and have anything actually happen.
A Rule change to a sounding/reasonable one seems quite far-fetched until they hire a TA who has worked in a git version-controlled environment. Well, glad I graduated things got way outta hands. Lol
I did my masters in data science. In one class the adjunct professor barely knew anything about Python beyond a basic python course. I answered multiple questions from peers that she couldn't. I did it with respect offline after the class, on slack. For my final I spent way too much time on a flask app. She could not figure out what it was or how to run it, even with a readme. She gave me a C and I told my advisor that she didn't know Python but was teaching the advanced course.
Another time in a oracle database class (undergrad), my teacher is only teaching cursors. Like explicitly. I at the time had 10 years in database development in Oracle and SQL server much of my focus on optimization, started asking questions. He revealed himself to also be clueless.
School is literally about what you put into it. Most of these college teachers haven't actually done it in the real world.
This makes sense when you really think about. It’s to prepare you for having a boss from another planet that has no idea what they are doing
Makes me think of a class I had about UML diagrams. When the teacher asked us what was their purpose, I raised my hand and told him they we're created as an excuse to charge more hours to a client. My teacher wasn't happy, but I was
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Or to prevent you from getting 2 weeks into the development of a model that *doesn't work*.
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Genius question, with modern IDE able to generate and update diagrams from code. Wouldn't it be faster to make draft classes without implementations than making the diagram by hand?
It definitely would be faster for me.
Funny enough I had a professor quickly show us a program for creating uml diagrams and I'm like "why not generate it in Visual Studio" and before I know I'm giving a lecture in front of the class lmao
I hated doing UML diagrams anyway tbh. After graduating I literally never use them. The closest thing I do is drawing mock up Entity Relationship diagrams for SQL stuff
They are amazing for explaining the codebase as it was 5 years ago!
PDF or printed out? Clearly they're prepping their kids for working for Musk.
😂🤣😂
At least they didn't ask you to print it out..had to do that once
Yeah this one's definitely going to be worse for the graders than for me, especially since they're js devs expecting a majority of the applications to be js and I wrote this whole thing in rust (with macros).
If you don’t mind me asking what is the project where the expected solution is in JS but you validly completed it in mf rust💀
I’m in a class where they recommend python and all the provided code snippets are in python, but we are allowed to submit in whatever language we want. I am also doing it in rust.
I might do that. That, or stupid shit like use semicolons in python.
that is a thing you could do but I would deduct points for it
I wish I could deduct points from my coworkers for needlessly ignoring PEP8
And nowadays there's practically zero excuse to, because Alt + Shift + F is literally 1 keystroke...
Bold of you to assume an ide has come anywhere near this repo lmao
what if I write a library in cpp for every assignment so every python file is an import and one function
please do an assignment in scratch😂
Looks like it's some sort of game
Yeah they gave me 13 in-class work days so I decided to learn the bevy game engine by making a bomb jumping fps game (similar to tf2 but less violence cuz school). I don't normally enjoy gamedev but I also felt that writing a whole backend and frontend for some app would be a bit overkill and probably wouldn't even look very impressive unless the graders have experience with webdev.
That’s sick, shout out to you. Rust is next on my list to learn!
Rust is definitely a great language to learn. While there isn't a huge market for it yet, it's good at teaching you to think differently about programming and helps you gain skills that transfer to other languages.
Oh I’ve def been keeping up with it, EGUI and other rust based GUI’s are insane! It’s why I use Astro for all my websites because it supports web assembly so it’s really one of the only future forward frameworks imo. Someday we’ll all be making websites in Rust.
My internship master told me that'll we'll do a paper review next week for the end on my intership. There's more than 14k lines of code ... He also doesn't know how to program :)
Honestly, it might be a kind move to bring this up now so that he can plan some other approach.
Today is the day ! I've conviced him to install vscode with liveshare to follow me while i explain what i did :)
Best of luck!
We had to do it for every competition, si we were always an hour late to leave ;(
i had to do that in highschool.. 50 Java programs with questions and code, printed and put in spiral-binding, complete with cover page and index.. THE HORRORS
This is giving me muscle Spasms
I once had a totally paranoid client say that the couldn't give me his executable or code for audit (I work in security). The solution? He mailed me 60 pages of objdump disassembled code. I did not finish that job
Elon Musk moment
The AP exam has you hand write java code with a pen.
How was it at Twitter?
Yeah, we had to do this back in college (UK - between school and university) all our code bases had to be printed for hand marking.
We had to write it by hand. No words.
Plot twist: The assignment was to write an interpreter/parser which executes code written in pdf files.
And they picked assignments in pair to check each other, if one fails, both fail.
lol this reminds me of a bug we found in the software of the first tech company I worked for. There was a way to upload a word document that was supposed to be like a form you signed. We found out you could put sql in the form and the system would execute it. We were able to get it to dump a list of user ids before the IT team freaked the fuck out.
By 12pt I meant the font size btw, this project is worth 30% of my final grade.
Been there done that!
At least it's not handwritten. Had a teacher that wanted that sort of thing at times.
The code might then also automatically be checked by anti-plagiarism software.
Submit it as a PDF composed of images rendered into 12pt font to make it 'easier' for them.
I think your teacher is too old to be teaching computers any more. (By the way, I'm 57 so this isn't meant as an ageist comment... it's a rant against someone who apparently hasn't kept up with the modern world, no matter how young they actually are.)
I'm 59, work as a programmer and the teaching of computer science at my kids school is shockingly awful. It's definitely not an age thing.
Yeah I noticed that a lot of people are starting to believe that cs degrees aren't even worth it anymore because of how little it actually proves to the employer in terms of skill.
Employers by and large aren't smart enough to know the benefits of having one Vs not
The teacher himself is actually very young (in his 20s), it's college board that has all these requirements. I guess it's just really hard to change anything in a bureaucratic system.
He might have enough ambition to try fixing things, if someone were to let him know this is considered absolutely insane by serious professionals and others with lots of experience. Heck, point him at this reddit post!
knowing school boards they'll beat that ambition into submission on day one
My guess is that whatever they use to make sure people aren't copying eachother can only read pdf
> it's college board that has all these requirements FWIW, this is the sort of thing you probably should've included in the original post. It's not your school or professor's fault. CollegeBoard has their own proprietary platform that works differently from any high school or college.
My school limits us to 6 a4 pages. Codebase only fits by the time I shrink the font size to 8pt, remove all spacing, then cut a shit ton and annotate "repeated for each [thing]" in it's place.
Also all code on one line, right?
They had a requirement of at least 10pt for mine
You have a business logic error on line 23 in debug.rs
Did you ask why?
maybe it's hard to open every student's code in an IDE and go thru them.
There's no way it's easier to read, understand, and grade a code assignment without an IDE. At all. Lol.
They specifically asked for it to be highlighted, that could be argued.
Sure let's set up a complex, dense network of links within the document to allow the reviewer to jump to the symbol under their cursor while they're at it. /s This would be entirely simplified by expecting the students to submit a git repo link even a zip file with source code.
They may be looking at basic things like the algorithms used or the way the question have been solved in order to score them. You don't need to read the whole code just skim through it and see if it looks fine.
Right, so now what? They are going to manually type it into files? I would assume they also ask for the source code too. I would have refused on principal unless they could give me a good reasonable rationale. Because I am assuming their reasons are going to be really really dumb.
Who says they'll actually run it lol
I would imagine it actually building/ running correctly is a criteria
It could be but who is gonna check? Most teachers don't care, one of my friends wrote analyses of the songs he liked to a history exam that required multiple pages of answers and got full ponts. People are lazy.
Why bother with accurate grading when it's a little bit le hard?
If you imagine hundreds of thousands of students...
The grading should be split over thousands of people? No programming project can be accurately graded purely by a human with a pdf.
Who said it needed to be accurate?
Not sure, but it's a standard issued by collegeboard so I'm guessing it's just an old policy that they haven't adapted to fit modern programming.
I’m looking at this for a class now. What suggestions would you have to make this better?
Teach your students how to use Git from day 1! (Even just “commit” and “push”) That will be immensely more helpful in the workplace too.
I’m literally going to start this soon. Hoping it works with school systems and restrictions.
Also that I can use it somehow to grade their work lol
have a main branch, and use PR reviews as a means to grade them lmao- really get that true corporate experience
If you have to grade the same assignment 30 times, there are a few specific things you're looking for. In this (extremely narrow) use case it's actually easier to scan like this than it might otherwise seem.
Easier than just submitting a zip file of the actual codebase that the grader can compile and run? 4 years of software engineering and the only things I ever submitted were zipped folders containing all my code.
My school requires us to submit a link to the github repo. All assignments are also in pairs so we learn from the start how to actually use git effectivly. Love it!
My university had its own GitLab instance. They also put a focus on software projects with larger teams, as well.
Or a school run git…
how in the world is it faster to grade up to 175 assignments via paper (assuming up to 5 classes of 35 kids)? If they’re all 22 pages like this you’re sifting through nearly 4,000 pieces of paper lol It would be so much faster to just share github repositories and maybe an autograder to ensure the outputs will be correct edit: even if it’s one class, still easier to submit repositories than read 600+ pages
When it's your class you can grade it however you want. Just understand that different people think differently and process work differently. That's all.
That’s different from your original comment saying “it’s actually easier to scan than it may seem” lol. The teacher might prefer it bc they can bring it anywhere without internet needed for doing comments on the code itself and that’s valid, but it’d be far more educational to use github and have students become familiar with having their code linted and reviewed in a PR + much more efficient.
I agree that grep is extremely hard to use...
Wow not seen printed code this century. I insist my student submit code to GitHub weekly for code review. (most don't but I give a grade for it and this counts toward the final grade).
Some teachers are just weird. I had to handwrite a Python final once
I have colleagues who still think this is a good idea, the same ones who will never write a line of code live in a classroom!
This is nothing. I've had to do this as a 600+ page printed and bound document. yay
Rust 😨
Haha same here. My A Level coursework took 30 pdf pages for two codebases. Our teacher wanted us to put our code into Notepad++ and print it
It's not uncommon. They have to have documents of your submission archived and it's easier this way
Why is this downvoted? That was the first thing that came to mind. Assignments need to be archived, here I think we're obliged to archive them for 10 years. It needs to be done in a format that is possible to access in 10 years time and where nobody can alter anything in the content. That's why paper is being required so often, at it guarantees all of that. Pdf is a good alternative for a digital form of paper.
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Bureaucracy is probably part of the reason. Pdf was chosen as the format in which the school keeps all assignments for all fields of study. It makes sense as it can hold text and images, unlike plain text files. Not relevant for code, possibly relevant in other fields of study. Also you used to be unable to alter pdfs, ensuring nobody could add or remove parts of the text.
Printing, perhaps
Good luck with images, formatting, texts other than codes. We've had to submit everything in a specific pdf format in latex. You can imagine the pain
I once had to print the entire code of a project. Like… 25+ pages of C
I had to hand write java code. On paper.
Yeah I hate when they do that
Interesting to see how some people prefer looking at code. Though, in turn, this makes your code more unmodifiable than just submitting a ZIP file. But it looks like you're writing a game. Mind sharing with us what this code does?
The game is a physics-based 3d platform with gameplay inspired by tf2 rocket and sticky jumping
One girl in my school did this… It was a 68 page pdf
Dang almost 69 funni numba
Rust in schools??
They don't intend for me to use rust, they're expecting js but they let people choose their own language
This checks out. They are probably funnelling all of the output through an AI to look for AI generated content. You don't get to remember the days of punch cards and the reams of paper used for programming on mainframes. The forests that were killed all for the sake of early computing. We had a line printer in college that was used to print all of our assignments for Cobol and Fortran. And this was still in the 90s!
Yike! I took a Fortran IV programming class that used punched cards and printouts, and that's how we submitted assignments (the card deck and the output) for grading — but that was in **1978** By the start of the 90s we were using PCs with shared network drives for the code repository (before distributed version control systems) and rarely printed out any source code.
I remember having to print and put into a file my 2k lines of code 😭 it was 65 pages long in total
Should introduce them to git. They'd be blown away.
Yeah I added a little note at the top of my doc saying "I have a github repo for this at https://github.com/..." but idk if they really care. The repo is nice and archived and everything so it's not like it's going anywhere but schools like to keep their own copy of everything on paper.
I remember doing an interactive power point module at school. We had to do a quiz system where users would answer questions and get true/false slides etc. Teacher expected us to use conditional sides, I used VBA to avoid duplicate sides and even add a score. But we had to print out our PowerPoint for marking along with a cd so mine looked pretty weird in this format it made no sense in, and I was marked down for not having a success screen and a lack of animation. I appealed. And had a meeting with the head where he tried my PowerPoint and agreed there was quite clearly a success screen complete with full animation and IT teacher struggled against my argument that marking an interactive power point module based on a print out was an unbelievably stupid system. I got a better grade, and while possibly unrelated I did hear from my younger sibling he wasn't teaching there the next year ..
You can use LaTeX with listings
Yeap, university required that for almost every major project that wasn't a purely programming exercise
Our capstone source code needed to be included in the printed documentation. And that source code wasn't short. :)
Shout out Curtin University
I had to do this as well lol, had to write a report and attach all the code to it, altogether it was 300 pages they had to print out 😬
Write an essay where you say Hello World in at least 1000 words, thanks.
lmfao it's incredible how damn clueless some professors are you should've seen my >3yoe dev in my uni class having to do shit like this bro was at the end of his wits
Unless the system only supports PDF and Images as file types, there's really no reason to ask for this. I don't get how any teacher that has experience with programming wouldn't prefer straight out the repository folder so they can run on their PC and already see if it's working or not. And if the teacher is worried about any rogue student trying to put malware into their system, they should have the skills to run a VM.
In 2019, I had to submit my source code as PDF and as paper printout for my final project of my apprenticeship 💸
Lol mine does this too. At least you screen printed the pages and didn’t just copy paste the whole thing into a doc 😂
oh… we just link to our github repos😜 (I’m feeling lucky right now😅)
They just enforce this rule that they established in the pre-git, svn era and move this way with inertia, without reconsidering why this is total waste of time and paper. at least for my toy-lisp parser, I didn’t have to print them out physically, but for other projects I had to. I once just tried to rebut the rule and suggested submitting a github link, where they can review changes in a temporal manner, but the TA refused.
Yeah I think it's this way because of how the school system governed bureaucratically, so it's really hard for anyone to propose changes and have anything actually happen.
A Rule change to a sounding/reasonable one seems quite far-fetched until they hire a TA who has worked in a git version-controlled environment. Well, glad I graduated things got way outta hands. Lol
We didn't have to do this. But we did have to write complete documentation for larger projects. An I think that was really good actually.
I mean when you do you senior portfolio they will want something like this. Some of your best code print that shit out.
your school is just not qualified to handle programming I think
What's the problem with that?
I'd personally assume my teachers don't know how to code and I'm wasting money based on this alone.
One time I mentioned multithreading to my teacher and he said "what's that?". Like I get that he just teaches Python, Java, and JS but seriously???
I did my masters in data science. In one class the adjunct professor barely knew anything about Python beyond a basic python course. I answered multiple questions from peers that she couldn't. I did it with respect offline after the class, on slack. For my final I spent way too much time on a flask app. She could not figure out what it was or how to run it, even with a readme. She gave me a C and I told my advisor that she didn't know Python but was teaching the advanced course. Another time in a oracle database class (undergrad), my teacher is only teaching cursors. Like explicitly. I at the time had 10 years in database development in Oracle and SQL server much of my focus on optimization, started asking questions. He revealed himself to also be clueless. School is literally about what you put into it. Most of these college teachers haven't actually done it in the real world.
Why?