@dtech said:
I know a lot of students who are like that. Usually its enough to give them a few pointers (pun only a little bit intended) what they might have to do or where the error might be. Usually they are much happier with that, because they can fix what has been holding them up and continue or finally get a starting point about how they might do that. True student then continue really (try to) understand it the.
What happens if you give them code is usually: I do not understand this, but my assignment is due soon. I'll just (have to) copy paste this.
Ofcourse, there are always people who just want an easy way out and commit (semi- or full-)plagiarism. Those are usually quickly weeded out in the first/second year in my experience.
Believe me, I tried giving the guy some hints, but he's a pretty hopeless case.
Example: one part of the assignment (an application that can import movies from the IMDB) included doing some work and showing a JProgressBar. He opted to make it show in its own JFrame. Nothing wrong with that approach, of course. Then he was completely overwhelmed because he could not figure out how to communicate new progress values to the JProgressBar in the JFrame. After I told him to make a setter along the lines of public void setProgress(int Progress, boolean Indeterminate) { /* do it yourself */ }
, he looked at me as if I just spoke to him in Japanese. Long story short, I helped him through it a bit and he arrived at a point where his program worked but the progress bar never updated (it just hung). I told him to look into SwingWorker to make his application multi-threaded. I think that may have been a mistake and I should've just told him that this is how Java works.
Another incident: he wanted to "stop the codings [he] writes from running [when a window popped up]". After another few minutes of discussion, it turned out he wanted to make a modal window. I told him to use JDialog instead and to look into the setModal method (which is deprecated, but easier since it takes a boolean). Of course, he went the complete opposite way, and tried making use of a while loop that tested whether the JFrame he made was still visible.
I've been doing my best to avoid the guy and think he's gotten the hint that whatever he's doing is pointless because he will fail the course anyway (70% of the mark comes from coursework).
To anyone else who still has the "joy" of going to university (and working as a C# programmer to afford going there): under no circumstances must you let people know that you know things. Your experience will be much nicer.
*sigh* ... and don't get me started about the lecturer of the course. He thinks the "finally" keyword is not important enough to mention in lectures, and he's one of those idiots who jumped onto the bandwagon that "goto" is bad without being able to offer an explanation of what makes it bad (he threatened to fail me if I "used goto in Java", forgetting that Java does not support it).