It's called fear, specifically fear of a failing grade and expulsion, heh. Unless the instructor is on crack they're going to want source code, not compiled binaries. If you don't compile it yourself before grading it, you have no clue if they went and did a bait-n-switch type thing. Copied a working program from someone and then just wrote enough source to make it look like it would work at a passing glance. Also let's you spot the idiots who were dumb enough to copy from each other.
As for the assignment seems pretty typical for an intro. class. For those who have no prior programming background the concept of classes and inheritance can be hard to wrap their heads around. Forcing them to do it this way eases them into the ideas, for those who grasp it though it's torture. Typically the smart folk add all the fun stuff in to keep themselves amused, my first though was a sniff crotch method.
- DW |
