Monique Y. Mudama said:
Very much depends on the professor.
That's why I gave him/her the benefit of the doubt and described the basic
approach to solving the problem. That should get the ball rolling; if the
questions were sincere, the original poster will probably need to come back
with some detailed questions and will show the code they built in response
to the various suggestions and we can help them fine tune the solution.
I'm sure every prof has a different set of conditions under which they will
give a student a break. You can be sure that the students will have tried
many different excuses over the years to see what succeeds in getting them
out of assignments from that particular prof and the rumour mill will have
distributed the information far and wide. Of course some students will even
lie and invent an illness or dying relative to get out of assignments.
I feel sorry for the prof in these situations; unless he/she is completely
rigid, he/she is going to want to believe what students say but will also
wonder if the student is just lying to them to get out of work. Asking for
proof will offend some students and possibly earn the prof a reputation as a
"nazi" but believing every student will soon earn the prof a reputation as a
pushover. Either way, bad feelings result.
I went to school in the US, and I
had a Diff EQ professor who told a friend of mine that his grandmother
dying was no excuse to turn in homework late. "If you really know the
material, emotions shouldn't get in the way." Right.
Maybe the prof thought your friend was making up the dying grandmother to
get out of work?
Same professor who, when I came to him asking for help, asked me what
my major was, then told me that I was bad at math and logic, so here
are the CS courses that would give me the most trouble. (Need I
mention he was dead wrong? Finite automata was my favorite class,
actually ...)
Telling a student that they're bad at the subject has always seemed like a
bad idea to me. An instructor should always try to encourage the student to
help make them believe in themselves and their ability to do the thing being
taught in the course. I don't mean that he should tell every student that
they're a genius - I don't have much use for false praise either - but the
instructor should certainly not disparage the student's innate abilities.
Some people will get things right away, some will have to struggle a while
before the light dawns, and a few might never get it but it's not because
they are brilliant or stupid; it has a lot more to do with how things are
presented to them. A given student may get what the prof is saying simply
because he explained it in the same way that the student thinks about
things; another student, equally smart, may not get it because he needed to
have it explained in a different way. In an ideal world, each instructor
would have enough time to present the information in several different ways
to each class so that everyone involved would hear the information presented
in a way that is meaningful to them. In the real world of course, the
instructor tends to present the material in whatever way it is laid out in
the text book or course notes and leave it to people who don't follow that
presentation to "translate" that information into terms they understand on
their own time.
One of my friends, Clive, is quite bright but has never learned much
programming; he had one or two courses years back but gave up on programming
when he couldn't understand arrays and array processing, particularly
multi-dimensional arrays. Then, one day, Clive and I and one of my friends
from university, Alex, were sitting down to eat at a social occasion. Alex
and Clive had never met before. Alex, started talking about programming
with me. He mentioned how he had once helped the light dawn for some
students who were struggling with arrays and described what he had said.
Clive, as a non-programmer, was just listening politely when suddenly his
face lit up: Alex's explanation had suddenly cleared away all of the
confusion he had had about arrays many years before and he suddenly got it.
It was a real "Eureka" moment for Clive. Clive was always bright; he just
hadn't had someone explain arrays in terms that made sense to him until that
moment.