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One of my teachers did that in elementary school. I read the whole thing, saw the final instruction, and then got confused about what order I should follow the
by thelopa 5y ago
One of my teachers did that in elementary school. I read the whole thing, saw the final instruction, and then got confused about what order I should follow the instructions in. The instructions were clearly contradictory and as a result there wasn’t an unambiguous way to interpret the paper. I had recently started playing with programming, and so I decided to model the task as though I was a computer executing a program. I started at the top and did all the silly instructions. Besides, it was more fun that way.
Afterwards the teacher chided everyone who didn’t read the entire paper before starting and did the silly instructions. I was bothered because I had read the paper and thought carefully about how I would handle it. I still think that assignment was dumb.
- IgorPartola 5y agoThat’s when you run around smacking everyone and yelling “undefined behavior!”
- laurent92 5y agoI had a class where we would need to write Assembly code on paper, then copy the result into the question sheet and hand it in. Of course, there was a social convention that the program itself would be turned in too, but it clearly wasn’t written in the instruction sheet, and of course I, as a geek, lacked the social conventions, so we respected the absence of instruction and didn’t turn in the Assembly code (The teacher was a miserable authoritarian). Our grade came in: Zero. Not even 10 out of 20 for answering the instruction sheet. Add insult to injury, the teacher was a feminist who worked to improve girls’ grades, so a group of girls did the same as us, but recovered their points because “they asked nicely”. So they had 17/20. We got 10/20 “because half an assignment is still half an assignment.”