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I think in OP's case they mentioned the nontrivial complication that admitting they did not teach someone well is admitting publically that some of your student

I think in OP's case they mentioned the nontrivial complication that admitting they did not teach someone well is admitting publically that some of your students are bad software engineers, which could affect them. It's not that they can't admit it to themselves, it's that they want to be tactful in announcing it from the rooftops.

ido 6y ago
I don't know what they taught them, but whom of us wasn't at some point a "bad software engineer"? That's a pretty normal point on a career path & I'm sure those with the aptitude of these students learned and improved afterwards. I teach programming to absolute beginners (freshmen students in an art school taking intro to programming) & try to not worry too much about "proper software engineering" - I intentionally do stuff like copy paste the same code from one file to another & solve things in a "dumb"/verbose way if it's simpler conceptually (and thus easier to understand). My goal is to get them from "afraid of the command line" to "can type some code into visual studio that can do something when you press run & then be able to expand on it further". Proper software engineering comes way later & will be taught by someone else (possibly by the students themselves once they realize the naive approach I showed them at first got them into a mess when they tried to develop a bigger program).