I certainly hope it wasn't my school he came from (I'm also a French engineer).And doesn't even surprise me. My traineeship was too writing simulation stuff in raw C, but I had to work on code inherited from a previous trainee, code which was also worked on by another person doing his master thesis in the lab. First the code is handed to me as a giant .txt file which I was supposed to change to .c and put in a project; no version control. The code was basically a giant main() function (more than a thousand lines). And partway through the traineeship, I discovered a flaw in the simulation which basically meant all results obtained so far were skewed. Whee. Oh, and of course the quality of the code that was originally handed to me was about similar to that of the OP's trainee. (sorry for being late, I missed that topic when it was originally posted)