Note: This is fiction, but it is based on a real occurrence.

About a week ago me and my lab partner completed our solution to a programming assignment and submitted it for examination. We were pretty pleased with our solution, and thought it would pass without problems.

Some days later I got an e-mail. It was the results from the assignment examination. "Cool," I thought, "let's see what this guys think of our solution." I opened the e-mail, and the first line said "Your assignment has been Rejected". I had not expected this and entered a state of light shock (almost). I read on.

First thing the guy who had examined our solution (let's call him Alex) had written was the following: "I changed your code, and the entities in the program crashes." I became confused. I thought he was supposed to examine what we had written, not he. He had included the code that he had changed:


That's odd. The original code was:


So what he was saying was that our entities were crashing when their setSpeed function ignored the actual speed they tried to set. Meaning, when they tried to stop, by running setSpeed(0), they didn't and crashed instead. Well, duh. I never would have guessed. I wondered if this guy was trying to bully us or if he just wasn't very clever.

We handed in the assignment again, now with a comment about the setSpeed function, how it worked, why the solution worked when the setSpeed function was intact and so on.

A day later, the answer arrived. I opened it. It said "Your assignment has been Rejected". Sigh. Now what? I read on, and this time Alex had written "Ok, they don't crash when setSpeed is OK. But when I removed your main loop, the program no longer works. Fix it." What the hell? What's wrong with this guy?

Me and my lab partner laughed a bit about it, then we sent an e-mail to the person responsible for the course. We thought that maybe he could have a chat with this Alex guy. Only he never answered. Great. So we tried to submit our solution yet again. The working original solution, with no additional comments, except the line "This is the main loop. It is vital for the program. No touchie."

Yesterday, there was this e-mail. It said, "Your assignment has been Rejected. There's something wrong with your setSpeed function. I'm afraid you've used up all your possible hand-in tries for this assignment, so you will have to wait until next year to try again. This means you fail this year's course."

Wow. That's like a completely new level of stupidity. Time to go talk to someone important ...