Students, We Absolutely Know If You Copy/Paste Code Blindly

# Maybe we don’t say shit, but we KNOW

I’ve tutored over 70 different programming students in the past 2 years, and have seen all kinds of stuff (both good and bad).

Some students genuinely have a good attitude, and are willing to put in the work and time to improve as much as possible in the shortest amount of time. Others not so much.

I’ve even had one student attempt to get me to do his exam for him by lying! (WTF!)

When a student copy/pastes code blindly

This often happens when

1. the student has no idea how to solve a problem
2. the student isn’t willing to put in the time/work to try
3. the student believes he can take the easy way out by copy/pasting

Usually, the student will use code with some funny complicated algorithm that I know for sure that they cannot write.

One example

I was training a student on his Python logic, and asked him to write a function that calculates the highest common factor between 2 numbers. And the following week, he showed me something like:

def hcf(num1, num2):
  out = 1
  for i in…