I also had difficulty choosing what to share for this post, however, reading some other posts helped jog my memory and remind me of one experience involving a course project. As part of a structural design course project the objective was to design a system to meet certain requirements. We submit our design as a team and the submission with the lowest weight, meeting the specifications, would ‘win’ and get extra points.
A friend and I formed a team and started iterating on the design with the software tool given to the class by the teacher. Quickly we learned that the input/output of the tool made for a very slow iteration process on our design. To improve things, we developed a series of MATLAB scripts that would feed design parameters to the tool and plot the results. As juniors, this was very demanding, both stretching our coding capability on top of the existing project knowledge requirements. I remember 2-3 nights working until 3 AM, especially the day the submission was due. We optimized a design that had excellent weight characteristics and met the performance requirements, as we understood them.
After a satisfied submission, we got back our graded design. Despite having the lowest-weight design, we did not win and furthermore got a low grade because we ‘had not met one requirement’. After further investigation we learned one ambiguous requirement, which could be interpreted two ways, was not satisfied. Our interpretation differed from that of the professor. A minor change would enable us to meet that constraint (had we known) and our design would likely still be lowest weight. But the professor was not going to bend and we were left with the medium grade on the project. It was hurtful to know we could have submitted a basic design and gotten a better grade than our highly optimized version.
That experience didn’t lead me to change my field or drop the class. However, it was a heavy hit at the time and I had no excitement for the rest of the course. Having taught courses now I can see how this could happen as projects often have untested ambiguities until a few classes clarify them. However, regardless of the grading, I think its important to recognize student efforts and make sure they walk away understanding the value of their achievement (though it may not be the grade). In this case, our project coding lead to improved skills in this area which has served both of us well.