Stumbled across this.

My students had their mid-semester test last night. It was a practical programming test, held in the computer labs from 6:30pm - 8:30pm.

My students are currently trying to implement a CSV import function for an assignment due tomorrow. They have to read lines from a CSV file, split those up into values, strip off any extra quotes, and then use these values to set properties of an object. It's not terribly difficult, but I haven't given them an entire code example that they can just copy and paste to do this. They actually have to figure out some of the logic themselves, and then find some functions to help them. In particular, they have to handle the stripping of quotes and figure out how to ignore the header row.

Some students need a lesson in manners. There are times when I wonder why I bother doing this at all.

I've been marking assignments last week, and I caught some students in my course cheating. At this stage, it looks as though two of them copied another student's partly complete assignment and then turned in almost the exact same project. To cover their tracks, they went to the enormous effort of renaming ONE variable. Just one.

I had a student come see me today because she's failed the course already. The problem was, she refused to believe me.

A couple of weeks back, I was at a loss as to what to get the students to do for a lab exercise on reading and writing files, so I decided to get the students to write some basic (non-personal) information about themselves to a text file.

My students are currently working on their final assignment. All four assignments in this course are based on a single application. In the first assignment, they wrote business objects, they developed a UI in the second and a data access layer in the third. In all three, I supplied the other two layers, and so they could be counted on to be reasonably bug free. The students had only to figure out and debug one layer at a time.

A couple of minor things I have asked my students to do are to read and write Word documents using office automation, and to make use of the Microsoft Agent control. In one lab I combined these, by asking the students to read the contents of a Word document into their application, and then having the Microsoft agent read the file aloud.

My students had an assignment due yesterday. They have had this assignment for 5 weeks now, and I gave them a four day extension because the due date clashed with a semester test and assignment in a course most of them were taking.

A student writes this on the discussion forum today:

A student came to see me today looking very serious. He explained that he got zero for a certain part of the assignment and wanted to know why. Then he said:

I thought my students were bad enough with their last minute assignment extensions, but I never would have predicted this.

For the labtest, I gave my students a small programming task that involved creating a system that catalogued diamonds.

One of the tasks my students have to do during their first assignment is to start a new thread on our discussion forum. There are no rules, they can post about anything.

I’ve had a very busy time over the past two weeks with my students having a major website development assignment due. Out of a class of 88, I’ve had around 12-15 students coming to see me nearly every day.

Almost every semester I get one case of plagiarism. Some are more blatant and idiotic than others. I’m never sure whether I’m upset with them for cheating, or for thinking I was so stupid that I wouldn’t notice.

This semester, my students were creating a website which features a to-do list. Anyone who registers on the site can create their own to-do items which they can retrieve later. Unfortunately, some of the students hadn’t quite implemented authentication properly when their sites went live, and one of their classmates was a vandal with fellatio on their mind.