How to help students with: taking the assignment too literally
-
I take it you are teaching then? In my university days I had an eye opening experience across two courses. The first course we had an prof who would give us an assignment and award a C to work that did the strictest literal thing asked for, this prof asked us to always think about over delivering, optimizing, adding useful features, etc. The second course we had a different prof. On the first assignment I actually forgot about it until the day it was due, so I rush coded the bare strict literal requirements given to us. I got 98/100 A. I was confused, adding to the situation most of my classmates (who had also been in the previous course with me) were receiving D's and F's... and they were pissed. Turned out different profs wanted different things, the second prof was a true believer that we code to the requirements literally, period. The first not so much, he liked seeing extra effort. I am just sharing this in reply to your post, as it may be that your students already had a prof like my second one?
Yours is an excellent description of college: close to 80% of a student's effort is determining exactly what a professor wants. The other 20% is simply providing that. In of itself, that is not a bad thing; it is quite relevant to the remainder of life. In a job, you have to determine what the boss wants and adapt. At home, you have to determine a significant other's expectations. In each case, you get to decide whether to modify your behavior to remain in the situation or cut your losses and move on. School is a little rougher. It is possible to drop a course if you cannot alter yourself to match the instructor's expectations, but sometimes, no other routes exist and you find you must change to meet your goal. To the overall question, very few companies truly want "creativity". A unique solution is difficult for others to interpret and modify in the future. Ironically, creativity is also not a spontaneous, natural choice for most: indeed, as many have indicated, our elementary and secondary schools truly drown it out in most students well before college. The more a student remains in the sciences - computer, math, physics - the less creative he is. This tends to be the selling point of liberal arts: an exposure to more options that may not pertain to a future career, but will open the individual to different perspectives, and by association, be more "creative". In short, don't expect a student to easily "think outside the box"; all have been taught from preschool to "color within the lines", "line up alphabetically", "be quiet and courteous". As members of society, we all follow a LOT of rules. Creativity can be curated, but it doesn't come easily.
-
I'm sure you've seen this before or remember doing it yourself as a newbie. An assignment say something like "divide the array of bytes into groups of 4 bytes, then XOR all the groups" and the student thinks that means they have to make an `byte[][]` to hold thousands of tine 4-byte arrays, which is completely pointless but "the assignment said to do it". Or when explaining Huffman codes or such a "bitstring" is mentioned and the student thinks that means they should use a `string` to hold a bunch of "0" and "1" characters. Or the assignment says to translate a `for`-loop into assembly and they implement it in the most general and naive way even though it was just a "repeat 8 times"-kind of loop which has a much simpler implementation but they thought they wouldn't be allowed to use that because it's "not what the code says". I'm not sure what to do about this. I've told a bunch of them that it's basically OK as long as it does the end result is the same, and that they should really just use a simple and/or efficient way to implement it. They're struggling with this whole "how you talk about what you're doing abstractly isn't literally how you code it up" thing though. So, any ideas? How do I get this across properly? inb4 "just make the assignment literal"; that's not how it will ever work in their careers. Besides, it complicates and spoils the assignment with the kind of implementation details that *they* should come up with.
I would say you're not writing the assignments correctly if you're not getting the results you anticipate. Keep the assignment goals (requirements) clear and separate from tutor 'hints' at the anticipated solution. Better yet just point the students in the direction of the relevant topics that will help resolve the assignment. If you want to emulate the real world, then they won't get hints at the solution. They will get vague requirements or specifications. Probably with contradictions. In this scenario the students that ask questions to clarify the gaps ought to find a path to a better grade. Unless they get lucky and guess right. That happens a lot too.