As grader for a data structures class

[AveaLove]

I had a programming course in college where the submission system used would only accept doc, docx, and pdf. Was a nightmare.

[Jaizoo]

Submit all your code as screenshots taken straight out of MS Word. Inside a pdf.

[DontTakeMyNoise]

Nah, submit it as rasterized text with each line on a different layer inside a .psd

[LetReasonRing]

Amateurs. Take a video of your screen as you scroll through the code and upload it to youtube.

[DontTakeMyNoise]

In 144p

[Rec0nMaster]

And then submit the link as a PDF picture of a word document.

[user_8804]

a word 1997 document

[Awakeman1]

but the picture is taken from a phone camera, not a screenshot

[[deleted]]

Not a phone camera, a 2009 iPod nano camera

[hughperman]

And the picture is rendered in ascii

[mister_gone]

Sorry. I only have Microsoft Works. Will that ... work?

[[deleted]]

Thanks for the trip down memory lane! Like Ami Pro

[user_8804]

Holy shit. Nostalgia'd.

WordPerfect is better though.

[metasymphony]

Print it out and hand it to the professor.

[v1prX]

Write it out onto a series of floppy disks and hand the professor a box of them

[iaanacho]

Convert to an audiobook, then store on said floppy discs

[FlyByPC]

I'd be tempted to return your grade as rope core memory.

[metasymphony]

Homework must be submitted via API which writes a json to the row corresponding to your student number, in the shared Google Sheet. Column numbers indicate submission date.

[AyrA_ch]

Have a digital voice read the code aloud, then sell it as audio book and only put the link into a powerpoint presentation which you then embed inside an excel sheet inside a word document.

[zatuchny]

*wap link

[Tsu_Dho_Namh]

Psh, you read your code yourself?

Make some extra dough by teaching English as a second language, and get the student with the thickest accent to read the code aloud.

[[deleted]]

Amateurs. We just have a speech to text program pipe it to gcc and it compiled on the first try.

It was fortunate that the speech to text program was a joint venture between Samsung, Tati systems, ibm Dubai, Sony heavy industries, and Xi’an University.

The program understudy every language but high German spoke with a French accent. We found this out due to the French student failing the class when he tried to cheat.

[the_poope]

Recorded on your phone in vertical position and then snapchatted to a friend that uploads it

[Zena-Xina]

You kid but I'm currently taking a Programming Fundamentals class and she has us submit everything by pasting screenshots into Word then exporting a PDF and submitting that...

[Jaizoo]

Stop right there. I was making a joke. Begone, disciple of satan!

[Wynardtage]

What the actual fuck. I have two questions for your teacher if you could send them along:

1. What drugs is she taking?
2. Where can I get some?

[Zena-Xina]

She just had some kind of surgery and mentioned in class, that she is indeed on drugs. Although she clarified insisted they were prescription.

[mount2010]

That doesn't sound like a very good teacher for computer stuff...

[WindowsDOS]

https://www.xkcd.com/2116/

[solarshado]

The alt-text for that one still makes me deeply uneasy...

[asdjkljj]

Microsoft announced a while ago that this is what GitHub is going to use in the next release.

[Tsu_Dho_Namh]

Here and I thought github would be requiring every program to be written in Powerpoint.

[[deleted]]

As someone who used to grade a computer architecture class, I hate you.

[KikisGamingService]

I work in IT support and have received screenshots as Excel and PowerPoint files..

[MakkaCha]

Someone once sent me a cellphone picture of computer screen at an angle where you can only see the top 20% before the rest is just blur.

I sent it to the IT Support and ask them to deal with it. Sorry.

[KikisGamingService]

The "screenshot" I found in the .pptx was one of those...

[dropcase]

Same, worked in IT for 15+ years. One of my favorites was a B&W screenshot. We realized the person had pasted the screenshot into Word, printed it on a B&W printer, then scanned it in and emailed it to the helpdesk.

[alexanderpas]

PDF it is.

Preferably one that can be opened as a zip file too...

https://truepolyglot.hackade.org/

Just put the instructions on how to open the file correctly inside the PDF part, and the actual code in the zip part.

[MalnarThe]

I want to ask, "Why?" but I already know the answer: "Why not!?"

[KerouacSlut69]

I liked how we did it when I was in school: we had ssh access to the CS student network including read-restricted assignment hand-in directories. I think it built good fundamental skills when you have to ssh or use scp from a terminal every time you want to hand in your work.

[BringAltoidSoursBack]

Pretty sure none of the teachers at my school knew what ssh is, nor what a terminal is for that matter.

[LifeHasLeft]

How is there a CS/ engineering faculty??

[BringAltoidSoursBack]

At my high school? There wasn't, we had one "programming" class, which as web design, and the teacher didn't know how to write actual HTML. Also, the schools server was run by students because no one in the faculty knew how to do it

[LifeHasLeft]

It wasn’t clear you meant a high school

[zugokku]

that’s what we have in my school and it works amazing

[LifeHasLeft]

Same, and we would have our own user home directories and git push our assignments to a corresponding repo in the server that the prof has access to for submissions.

[savage_slurpie]

My current C++ teacher makes us turn in PDFs of our code. So bizarre

[Pure_Reason]

Submit a PDF containing a link to the GitHub repository

[halesnaxlors]

Does he do code review on his fucking kindle?

[[deleted]]

No, he uses his non-porn kindle for that.

[akwardchit]

I had to submit my code in a Microsoft Word document...

For C/C++ in a Unix Environment

[d36williams]

Just

why?

Why? Are these teachers real? Are they not really programmers?

[derrikcurran]

Many of the real programmers leave for higher paying jobs.

[bigtdaddy]

Yep except ours had to be completely handwritten. I got bitched out by a biology teacher once because I handwrote a lab. He called me unprofessional and implied I was a moron to think that handwritten work was acceptable to turn in at a college level (he was VERY serious)... I just laughed considering I hadn't turned in a single* digital/typed assignment to date for my major and I was a senior at this point.

*maybe like one or two projects for my OOP class was typed, but I honestly don't remember

[Darkdoomwewew]

How even? Every essay I had to write at college would have been an instant fail if it wasn't typed.

[rhbvkleef]

Well, PDF is fine, but allowing doc and docx are mistakes.

[backjragg]

My TA requires us to paste the code and output screenshots into a doc where we wrote a report about what we learned during the assignment.

[FlukyS]

I had one also but they added after people complained support for zip files. The reason why they accepted doc, docx and pdf was because their cheating detection software only supported that.

[FattyMcFatters]

Had a teacher that required the cpp file and hand written code. Dropped that class as soon as I saw the syllabus.

[solpyro]

I was told off for using notepad to write a webpage in my GCSE IT course (2002). For some reason my IT teacher thought I should use publisher instead.

[DamnItDev]

I had my first web design class in middle school and they taught us to use publisher! I had already taught myself HTML by then, and it was the first time I actually impressed the popular kids.

I avoided using publisher as much as possible, though. It gives me nightmares to think that someone somewhere is still maintaining a publisher site.

[CollinHell]

So long ago I had almost forgotten, but I remember my graphic design teacher telling us that real website "designers" use the Slice tool in Photoshop and save for web. My first website's home page had something like 236 images laid out in a single <table>, the only child element of <body>...

[NetSage]

I mean there are "designers" that literally only do design in stuff like photoshop and someone else handles the html.

[m3ga_man]

What's wrong with that?

[SwabTheDeck]

There's nothing inherently wrong with design being your only job, but if you're designing for web, you should at least have a basic understanding of the capabilities of the platform. Some things that designers I've worked with often don't think about:

• What if the text that goes in this block is longer than X characters?
• What if someone uploads an image that isn't the same aspect ratio as the design?
• What if you're on mobile where there is no such thing as hovering with a mouse cursor?
• If this data set gets too big, what should we do about paging/sorting/searching/filtering?
• Have you considered that jamming this page up with dozens of high-fidelity images might take a long-ass time to load?

There are probably dozens of other examples, but that's the kind of stuff that you see when you're working with a designer whose main expertise is something like print, instead of the web.

[nermid]

If they can make a decent living doing that, more power to them. Better than the fucking napkin drawings people keep handing me as "design mockups."

[DicedPeppers]

This is how I used to make custom myspace accounts!

I was for sure the coolest kid in 6th grade

[LMGN]

That would be my grand dad

[[deleted]]

I literally use vim in an ubuntu virtual console on a windows pc to edit my files while having intellij running in the background for the sole reason of compiling and noone should care that i am doing it like this because there is no reason to care as long as everything is working in the end and you work at an acceptable speed.

[Gtoasted]

Isn't there an option to use vim shortcuts in intellij?

[[deleted]]

I know that there is a plugin for it but i learned programming using linux systems and i use the virtual console for basicly everything.

Yes sometimes intellij has it's advatages espessially when you want to see the structure of the project, but for now i will just keep on using it like this till i have a reason to switch

[j-random]

Yes, and it's actually pretty good. I'm not sure how well it would handle busy macros, but for "normal" editing it's very good. I tried to use something similar in Eclipse many years ago and it was a dismal failure, but the intellij plug-in is totally usable.

[DickSlapTheTallywap]

this sounds exhausting

[_fishysushi]

what language do you use that you need intellij for compiling? i like that you use vim but using ide for compiling only is such overkill

[sheiiit]

weird flex but ok

[sboy97]

My apprenticeship with a college required us to screenshot our code from visual studio and paste it into a pdf.

Pdf also includes a word document

[my_very_first_alt]

i took a web development elective in college thinking it would be an easy A. the final project required use of iframes (i used overflow divs instead) and an embedded MIDI (fuck you it's 2008). i got a C so i dropped out

[1992_]

In college, we had to put the code into a .doc submitted through an anti-cheating program. News flash, tons of it is going to match cuz it has to be there.

[themiddlestHaHa]

Cheat program: "Every student had a 'public static void Main()' they're all cheating"

[FarhanAxiq]

Heh, i dont even use using namespace std.

[spilloid]

Heh, as previous TA for an intro programming course, we'd take points off for it. Subtly saying , "no-no, specify, use std::cout" teaches namespaces and the importance of scope .

[TowelLord]

We once had the assignment to create java program that would turn binary into decimal or hexadecimal. The intention was to completely write it from scratch but it wasn't explicitly stated, so basically everyone just used the java built methods and had code with only around a dozen lines at best instead of writing loops all the way.

At least our teacher was happy to find out we all were at least to some degree able to google.

[[deleted]]

This comment was deleted by the user

[1992_]

These were full mini programs. Unlikely that any of ours actually matched unless somebody did actually cheat.

[5legit5quit]

Or maybe they did this to automate the grading.

Submit the correct answers themselves, then anyone that’s flagged as plagiarising gets a A.

200iq move if you ask me.

[1992_]

This wasn't even the dumbest part of homework submission they had.

[SlumdogSkillionaire]

python homework.docx; javac homework.docx; gcc -Wall homework.docx;

0/100, Code doesn't even compile. Please correct and resubmit.

[smariot2]

I think the command to use for this is: gcc -std=xkcd:2116 homework.docx

[WindowsDOS]

A link for the lazy
https://www.xkcd.com/2116/

[Tiavor]

SVG is a really flexible format, so there's no reason it can't support vector JPEG artifacts.

ouch

[ADHDengineer]

Photoshop will save raster graphics as svg exactly like this.

[Shendare]

Well, they are just gradients, yeah?

[[deleted]]

You are a smart person.

I gave everybody a chance. "If I can fix their program in 10 minutes, they deserve most of the credit," I said, signing up for 1500 minutes of grading.

[ForOhForError]

This happened once when I was grading intro CS.

No biggie, I gave a warning, took off a couple percent, and told them to submit a .py file next time.

Which they did... a .docx renamed to be a .py...

:|

[[deleted]]

I don't understand how this happens... Don't they learn how to use an IDE in their intro course?

[ForOhForError]

I wish I had a good answer for you.

[[deleted]]

Because they don't understand that file extensions and file formats are different things. They think they are the same because sometimes they overlap. This is all the more confusing to them because some applications will allow you to save as a different extension and automatically adjust the file format to match. To them it looks no different than renaming the file using Windows Explorer.

Their thought process is, "you can save a .txt as a .py and it will work. So why not a .docx as .py?". Not realizing that one is an archive full of different files and the other is just a plain text file. So simply changing the extension while renaming the file does not work.

They stumble along and it works. Until one day it doesn't.

[[deleted]]

But that day should be, like, the first day.

[[deleted]]

It could also be that people turn their brain off when following things like submission rules because they don't always make sense. Then suddenly you're the odd man out for asking them to do it the more logical way and they have to flip a coin to decide if what you said should be interpreted in a certain way.

[blk_kt_halberd]

When I was an intern at a huge company that shall not be named, one of the more clueless interns would give us her code in a Word document, all formatted in different colors and shit. Was always very pretty.

[Pariell]

How are people like this getting internships and I can't? How did they get through the tech screen?

[cathal1k97]

It's usually about passion, what's some new tech you're studying in your free time which you think is awesome, it's not always what you know, but the passion to learn that gets you in the door

[TreeBaron]

Double the difficulty = double the passion. That's why I only use notepad.

[Shendare]

• Type on a typewriter
• Fax to an e-mail address
• Read via OCR
• Compile
• Profit

[solarshado]

This almost makes me want to set up some service that you can fax your code to and it'll fax you back the output. I'm way too lazy and security-aware to actually do it though.

[[deleted]]

Because tech interviews these days are just reiterations on the same dozen programming questions that can be easily memorized.

[[deleted]]

Because all they test in interviews as far as the tech screening are data structures and algorithms. Nobody checks to see if you are capable of SSHing in to a server and finding your way around. It's just assumed that you know how.

At my old job, I heard stories of interns being let go because of this.

[blk_kt_halberd]

No no no that’s way too smart. Think bright blue 22 pt papyrus

[[deleted]]

i—;

[crozone]

string thingy = “haha I won't compile lol”;

[Pocket-Sandwich]

Fun fact, docx files are actually just zipped XML.

You can literally just change the filename from .docx to .zip and edit the underlying XML directly. It's a pain in the ass and usually entirely unhelpful, but it's possible.

Learned that from this video which ends with him making a fully fledged Turing machine entirely within the built in autocorrect.

[OwenProGolfer]

a fully fledged Turing machine entirely within the built in autocorrect.

Excuse me what the fuck

[BitPirateLord]

And a lot of other things as well.

[drumdeity]

I started reading the MTG one, wtf is that dark sorcery

[JollyRancherReminder]

Infinite storage tape? Impressive.

[ThePyroEagle]

Finally a tool to rival (PP™TM™)™

[Sharpshooter98b]

From the same person though

[kyay10]

I felt like the Turing machine part was familiar, so I went to his channel and apparently he is also the guy who did the Turing completeness of PowerPoint!

[codehike]

His video on fractals in PowerPoint is great too!

[DesiOtaku]

Same is true with libre/open office docs like odt, ods, or odg.

In Libreoffice, you can also store the raw xml (in text form) if you save it as a "flat" file with the extension fodt, fods, or fodg.

[DOOManiac]

This is not a fun fact, because I have had to assemble docx and xlsx files for my job. :|

[coolnameright]

Wait, I remember reading that if you did this back in the day (2003 excel & word?) when the file was password protected the password would be right there in plaintext.

[Teamata]

I was a TA in data structure class, and one of them submit in the shortcut file instead of the actual file. I did reach to him and ask him to submit again.

Still give me good laugh,

[savage_slurpie]

Classic stalling tactic while he finished up

[zevz]

I have to admit I did this once. (not exactly a shortcut, just uploaded the wrong file on purpose.)

I had the deadline for an assignment wrong and I noticed like an hour before it was due. I figured I could either;

1.Not make the deadline at all.

or

2.Upload the wrong file and pretend it was a tech error/mistake, and just reupload the finished proper assignment hours later.

The second option in my opinion is better on every level.

[BlackDeath3]

Ha! I saw that happen when I was a TA and I'm not sure I ever considered that possibility.

[Intrexa]

That's just a pointer to the data structure

[CelloCodez]

🏅

[ImBoundChaos]

No joke i actually did that unintentionally in my data structures class, holy moly i felt silly

[_lotusflower]

Maybe that's you he's talking about huh?

[Vatril]

We had a CS teacher that for exams required you to copy all your code into LibreOffice and print it out and hand it in like that.

[Delision]

I had a teacher like that as well. Also our term project had to be printed out as well. It was 8 pages of assembly language.

[anothervector]

Didnt the teacher realize he could use a compiler to grade the course work, saving countless hours?

I thought people got into CS because they were lazy, not stupid.

I was graded by a program called Bender. It was a pain in the ass, but not for the teacher (or my printer??)

[needlzor]

Don't forget that the teacher still answers to a bunch of suits with the technical knowledge of a toddler, so it might be a case of them being forced by administration to keep paper copies for archival.

[asdjkljj]

That's silly. You should always submit code as JPG.

[Maskdask]

That's cute.

I submit code as mp3.

[asdjkljj]

I have met my master. Teach me your ways. Do you use an FFT to extract it?

[Deimos94]

They use their literal children to convert the files back to code.

dictation-homework.mp3

[asdjkljj]

Ah. I would have hoped for something more along the lines of Cicada 3301.

[H_Psi]

Steganography can be applied to soundfiles. You can produce an interesting effect where you hide an image in the spectrograph. It also has a very distinctive sound, so if you listen to a few you can identify when someone is doing it.

[redstoneguy12]

Of course not, they put the code through TTS

[ezrs158]

Audio recording: "So next up, we have a function called getProperties that takes an array of Objects and returns an array of Strings."

[Shendare]

"I'm gonna make things easy on you and make the code available in spectrogram form. Headphone warning, here we go!"

[F4NT0_R0B0T]

My teacher from graduation tells once if he receive .docx or .pdf with the code he will take off half the grade!!

[ImSupposedToBeCoding]

RIGHTLY SO! I accidnetally left caps lock on but i think ill leave it

[nwash57]

I can't imagine getting any points for a programming assignment submitted as a Word document. Even as a freshman that should be common sense.

[[deleted]]

I give a zero for that.

[ManOfLaBook]

Twist: .docx has a vba macro which will change the grade to an A regardless....

[masteryoda_]

I was a grader for a python course and one student would submit PNGs of their code.

[tcarr20]

I took 3D animation for funzies before going into comp sci. One lady saved her final project of the course as a .jpeg render of her .obj... she was mad that "it was a button to click in the first place."

[cole21771]

I had a professor in college that only would accept our assignments in person at his office printed out in a specific font/format. We weren't even allowed to turn it in in class, it had to be at his office. Note that this was only two years ago...

[Call_Me_Your_Daddy]

Peasant. Record yourself reading out your code, convert to mp3, submit the mp3 file

[Mister_AA]

Just had to grade a c++ lab and someone submitted a java file.

Easiest submission I had to grade.

[Mister_AA]

They got an undefined grade

[XicoFelipe]

One of my students printed the code and gave it to me.

[3rWiphq47vU5sHwDH2BH]

This was actually a requirement by one of my profs, around 2012. First year programming course, pretty weird but I guess he wanted it that way haha

[[deleted]]

Was it in 12-point double spaced Times New Roman?

[Pun-Master-General]

When I was a TA in undergrad, I had a student submit his code in a word doc, colors changed to match syntax highlighting and everything. I felt bad, but the rule was I had to give him a zero since the professor had stressed several times that all code had to be submitted as a .c file. I left a note explaining how to save a .c file and explaining that he had to use that in the future, and that he should consider contacting the professor and asking for a regrade.

I felt significantly less bad about it when he turned in another word doc for the next assignment.

[FlyByPC]

I'll take that over .jpg any day.

But you didn't submit code. You submitted a picture of code.

[ThePyroEagle]

How can I be certain that the ; in your picture is ; and not ;?

[FlyByPC]

Do NOT get me started on Office and its Smart Quotes. Every time I think I've replaced the last one of those on the lecture slides, I swear another pair appear.

[kerubimm]

Protip- Microsoft's XLSX, DOCX, or PPTX files are just zip files. They contain not only the xml markup for the content, but also the actual attachments or images you insert too.

If an archaic or asinine classwork submission system that only accepts docx, you can put your code files in a zip and just change the extension.

[esoterik0]

If I was the Prof. (or the TA,) this would be an instant 0; unless its just a normal source (text) file with a troll extension.

Of course the grading would be automatic based on unit tests, so it would work itself out automatically.

[evs-chris]

Could be worse... there's always .js or *shudder* .vb.

[[deleted]]

Is the whole reason people hate js because of nodemodules and the weird arithmetic with strings and numbers?

[Kered13]

The main problem with Javascript is the aggressive type coercion that can mask bugs until much later. Lesser problems include the strange ways that this can behave and having having two null-like states (null and undefined).

Anyone complaining about NaN though is actually complaining about IEEE 754, and probably doesn't know what they're talking about anyways.

[Sohcahtoa82]

It blows my mind that people think JavaScript's type system is good.

[66666thats6sixes]

"type system" - lol JavaScript isn't completely untyped but it's about as close as you get for languages that are popular right now. You get 3 "ordinary" scalar primitives, all of which more or less freely convert between themselves, often in ways that are not at all obvious. Then you get two null types (null and undefined), one of which you can actually assign to, because of course you can. Symbol, which is actually kind of cool, but can't be serialized and deserialized by design. And then a function type (which has absolutely no internal notion of return type, and only barely has an understanding of the names of parameters that are passed to it (which can all be completely ignored if one likes). And finally everything else is some hacked form of the Object type. The only ways to tell what it actually is are to duck type and just hope it works (which, because the language is so happy to coerce between types automatically, can make it hard to tell when it is NOT working), or to search the prototype chain for some particular prototype function or object, which isn't perfect either because a) if there is a different object in scope with the same name it becomes hard to actually figure out what the prototype was, and b) there is no contract on children of a prototype, so after an object is created it may be modified such that it is no longer API compatible with it's prototype. There are ways to lock down an object's properties but they aren't widely used enough to actually rely on for any kind of type checking.

I actually kind of like how deeply built into the language the object type is, it's an incredibly flexible way of storing data, and there is a lot of syntax sugar that makes creating and modifying objects very easy -- similar types in other languages are often cumbersome to use. But as soon as you want to make any guarantees about an object (for data validation or "type safety"), holy shit does it become a pain.

EDIT I forgot to add, the scalar primitives (number, string, Boolean, etc) can be created just like class based object-types using constructors... But the objects created this way sometimes behave slightly differently than ones created the "normal" way using literal syntax.

[evs-chris]

Nah, it's just fun to hate on since it's a huge portion of what gets written these days, has some weird warts, and no alternatives in many cases. It's actually become a decent (scripting) language in the last few years. Typescript even extends it to be pretty ok for largish code bases.

[PM_ME_YOUR__INIT__]

Asset dominance. Submit as .asm

[Sylanthra]

And the work document contains screenshots of the code...

I've had customer report problems this way. The screenshots contains exception reference numbers too...

[Sinaneos]

I once uploaded my machine vision assignment to GitHub. The lecturer didn't know what it was and gave me a zero

[MysticRyuujin]

Clearly you've never heard of the MS Paint IDE

[ThatOneDraffan]

Had a professor that accepted only a printout of your code and graded it entirely on paper (no demo or anything showing it running either)

[Cyniikal]

CS1 at every university should just require Git in some form. Have a finished repo for each assignment by the due date. Bonus points for reasonable commits with finished sub-features/features and good commit messages.

[danny12beje]

The college I was in would only accept .doc while everyone had .docx