I guess it must be common. I had a very similar experience at university except without the fillip of lecturers who actually had programming skills. Same gig t

I guess it must be common. I had a very similar experience at university except without the fillip of lecturers who actually had programming skills. Same gig though. Set a programming assignment that's way too hard for the class, because they hadn't been taught programming properly (in this case, implement a few simple graph algos so hardly Firefox 0-day level). Realize too late that nobody can pass the assignment and retroactively change the marking criteria to be entirely based on writeup. Result: as one of the only people in the class who actually submitted the full three working solutions, I got one of the lowest grades, because "You explained the algorithm in 'detailed code comments'? Do you think I have time to read student's code? It needed to be submitted in a Word document alongside the submission." This was at a UK Russell Group university, supposedly one of the elite. IMO universities are jokes. They were crap at teaching decades ago and that was before they were overrun with radical ideological activism. They're simply good at hiding the truth because academics are treated like gods - nobody believes students who say their teachers are terrible at their own subjects.