Profs are nice people

I don't interact with them much, so I never knew. They actually do deserve all that money.

I realized it just this week when one of my profs returned my assignment. Usually TAs do all the marking so I always thought profs are lazy bums who do nothing for their students.

He marked this assignment personally and went beyond my expectations. The course is User Interfaces and the assignment was to make a playable side scrolling game. One of the requirements was to fill out a self evaluation and some kind of readme.txt detailing some extra features you did for the game. I had designed this game in my mind for the longest time, trying to come up with a bunch of ways to make it more fun and interesting for the player, but I never got around to implementing it fully. I got the base of most of the code but never got around to enabling all those little things that was left untested before it was due.

In the end, I didn't even mention them in the readme text file. I thought all that effort would go to waste, but I didn't feel I deserved to get any marks for things that were half finished. I thought the marker would just simply play out the compiled game and read the readme and look for the mentioned features.

It turns out that the prof actually took a look into my code and saw all the little things that weren't even enabled. He liked my design and gave me full credit for them. It's unreal because I didn't even document them and those parts of the code were messy. He just saw it and realized what it was supposed to do. I imagine he and his TA did that for all the 120+ assignments which is simply just incredible. I never expected that. In the end I got 92/90, which is pretty good I think.

Maybe this prof is just special. Unlike most other profs, his lectures (most of which I don't have time to attend) are very enjoyable and he's got a great sense of humour. In any case, I have a whole new respect for all the profs out there.