Sometimes the disconnect between what is taught and what is expected by lecturers in assignments is very big, don't feel too bad! It could be because they are

Sometimes the disconnect between what is taught and what is expected by lecturers in assignments is very big, don't feel too bad! It could be because they are coming at it from the "experts bubble" (I'm sure someone will know the proper name) where they can't conceive of the types of problems someone coming at it with no experience will encounter. Going from a tiny "hello world" OS you've made by following instructions and notes to being dropped into a totally different codebase that uses probably entirely different patterns and conventions seems a little unfair. It's like expecting someone who has played around with some graphics API for drawing pixels to expecting them to make changes to the DirectX shader compiler. I had a similar experience - a totally new professor gave us a about 5 lectures on parsers, compilers, AST's, BNF etc, and then just expected us to design a whole language that would be compiled to C for the assignment, using classic tools like yacc etc. For reference, the average programming ability of the students in the class was "What's a switch statement?". Absolutely everybody failed to achieve anything, and the only reason I even passed it was because I took an example language the professor provided and reviewed it and stated how I would liked the language to work instead. It's all a bit absurd.