On 17 December 2013 15:51, Wolfgang Keller <felip...@gmx.net> wrote: >> >> I was also taught C as an undergrad but having already learned Java, C >> and C++ before arriving at University I found the C course very easy >> so my own experience is not representative. Many of the other students >> at that time found the course too hard and just cheated on all the >> assignments (I remember one students offering to fix/finish anyone's >> assignment in exchange for a bottle of cider!). > > The problem with the C class wasn't that it was "hard". I had passed my > Pascal class, which taught nearly exactly the same issues with > "straight A"s before (without ever having writeen any source code ever > before). And by standard cognitive testing standards, I'm not exactly > considered to be an idiot.
Please don't misunderstand me: I'm certainly not saying that you're an idiot. Also I'm sure many of the students on my course would have fared better on a course that was using e.g. Python instead of C. Well actually come to think of it some of the other students were pretty stupid. The lecturer had explained that they were using a plagiarism detector so if you copy-paste code from someone else they could catch you out for cheating. A few people took that literally and thought that it could detect copy-pasting (in plain text files!). The rumour went round that it would be okay if you printed out the code and then typed it back in. For some reason they didn't bother running the plagiarism detector until about 6 weeks into the course by which time ~20% of submissions were exact duplicates of at least one other (according to the lecturer who announced that all such students would get zero marks for those assignments). Oscar -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
