Re: Any research putting c above ada?

[Dale Stanbrough <dale@goanna.cs.rmit.EDU.AU>]

Alan Brain writes:

"Ray Blaak wrote:
 > 
 > If this had happened when I was tutoring, I would have simply let the
student
 > hand in the missing part of the assignment again. The important thing
relevant
 > to the course is the work the student did. That students should read the
 > instructions is important, but not as important as the actual work.
 
 Similar thing happened to a student I was tutoring last month. He made a
 mistake, and so submitted the wrong file.
 I marked him on the latest version of his answer he had in his workspace
 before the deadline, easily retrievable."


I beg to differ. For students in 2nd and 3rd years (and _possibly_ 1st), 
following specs is an important skill to develop. Managing software is
an important skill, knowing when to sign off a piece of work....

An excellent 3rd year student who wrote a very good Motif program made
a change at the _very_ last minute _after_ testing his program thoroughly.
Of course it core dumped when i fed it an invalid input file. He got 
lower marks as a result, but at least he learnt that you don't make 
changes at the last minute.

There are all sorts of lessons to be learnt in a course, and not all of them
are about the simple concept of programming. If we do desire to have people
understand the ramifications of their actions, well then you have to expose
them to what can happen. I thought that this was a particuarly valuable SE
lesson for this student (who knew he knew how to program already).

Dale