My most demotivational experience has been this semester. We had an assignment given to us that seemed straight forward at first, but the directions were misleading and unhelpful. The difficulty level set for this assignment was well beyond what was covered in class. The assignment also had unintentional but misleading suggestions, masking what actually needed to be implemented.
The educational goals of the assignment were unclear. We were expected to a) parse complex formulas that hadn’t been fully explained, b) implement them in SQL, and c) provide an interoperation of the results. We covered c in class, and it seemed to be the real educational goal. However, after spending 10 hours attempting to implement the formula and discussing it with the professor, I realized that I had no idea how to read the mathematical notation and had to trash all the work.