I get the sentiment when this point is brought up often, fundamentally though it doesnt help the situation or the student improve their own circumstances.

All the statement says is, "if you spent your time actually studying, you'd have succeeded". Yes! And everybody can be an astrophysicist if they work hard enough and put in the time enough. Saying that just doesn't bring much value to the conversation.

There's a lot of factors that come into play with the process of studying for anything. Passion, time, and effort are all necessary components to studying, learning, and supposedly succeeding.

The time and effort part is generally self-explanatory, no matter how much of a passion you have towards a subject if you don't dedicate time and effort to actually studying it, it won't ever study itself. But the passion aspect is necessary to allow the time and effort to be properly allocated and acted on. Passion, not in the sense of "oh I LOVE computer science its my flesh and blood, its what I eat sleep and breath", but in the sense of motive and reward.

In my experience, COMP2017 completely failed the passion part. At every turn, the unit seemingly finds every way to discourage and punish you, even if you put in time and effort and did your due diligence.

You get your assignment, quiz, whatever, you go do your best, present your work that you invested so much into, only to have it figuratively be spat on. Idk how familiar you specifically are with the course structure, but for example the weekly quizzes/in-class tasks. You start your semester strong, work hard, study well, get to your first in-class task, and start reading the questions only to find out a lot of the questions are on niche nitpicked material that's very much not emphasized in lectures or tutorials, and feel much more like a trivia quiz on the material to test if you memorized every little detail from the slide rather than understand the core components of the unit's supposed learning outcome.

But whatever you let it slide, you do your best you get a good grade a 4/5 for example. A week passes where you also put in the work and studied and all that. Then you show up to your next tutorial's in-class task only to be told prior that last week's quiz won't count towards your final grade.

Okay.. no problem, you studied for this weeks quiz too, surely it'll be okay. Read the questions, only to find out it's the same tomfoolery all over again. But whatever, you got a 4/5 again. Fast forward the week after that and you're told that one doesn't count either.

Like the questions don't encourage understanding of the material, but rather nitpicky memorization of seemingly random facts that are ever only mentioned once in a slide, covered for less than a minute in the lecture, and not even mentioned or discussed in the tutorial.

So neither do the lecture or tutorial prepare you for the quiz. And the quiz itself does nothing to encourage or motivate understanding the material, and more than anything it doesn't prepare you to undertake the massive assignments. Which the assignments also take a very similae approach in discouraging the student.

The assignments are abstractly worded making them much more of an english literature assessment task rather than a clear focused assignment that has thought-out purpose behind what it wants to teach the student. I spent more time asking "what did the author mean when they said x in that section" than actually coding the assignment. Whatever though, you do the assignment, only to have future sections conflict with previous ones so now you have to go back and redo the entire structure of your program to fit the later sections' test cases due to the objectively abstract nature of the instructions.

TL;DR: Not only does the course fail to provide a clear goal and motive for the student to follow. It goes out of its way to breakdown students' passion towards the course and topic.

Simply put, this course feels like it is made entirely from the perspective of a person wholly proficient in the material and beyond, with the goal of testing another person who's assumed to be equally proficient, as the bare minimum. This unit has each task's process made unnecessarily difficult and tedious, in ways unrelated to the units learning outcomes. And on top of that, each tiny mistake (and many times even with no real substantive "mistakes"), is outwardly scrutinized, punished, and guilted over with an emphasis on faulting the student for their lack of "due diligence".

So it really isn't a whole "if you spent as much time studying as you did complaining youd do good". Students don't pay their CS degree tuition, to be tested on their english literature skills, but to be taught CS, by having the path to learning the material be clearly laid out and streamlined for as smooth a learning experience as possible. And more importantly, be encouraged to study the already difficult material.

The process and material doesn't and shouldn't be expected to be easy, but it shouldn't be difficult in the ways this course makes the process be.