In today’s story, one college student goes back to finish a degree he started decades ago.

Even without the degree he had a successful career in IT, so he expected the computer science degree he was working on to be pretty easy.

It was until he encountered one professor who failed him on the very first test along with every other student in the class.

He decided to do some digging and figure out why everyone really failed this professor’s class.

Let’s see how the story unfolds…

Professor got schooled

Obscurity isn’t security, and I used that to get my revenge against an arrogant professor.

I went back to university in my late 40s to finish the computer science degree I started almost 30 years prior.

I had a long career in IT in the interim, doing programming, networking, and server administration, and was able to retire early.

I was finishing the degree as a personal accomplishment with no intention of doing anything with it.

Classmates warned him about a particular professor.

My first semester I had to take Systems Programming (using C).

I had programmed in C for over a decade and knew it well, so I was confident the language would not be an issue for me.

This class was required for the CS major and you had to make a B or better.

Four people in my class had taken it the previous semester and gotten Cs or Ds.

They warned me the professor came across as nice at first, but was a pompous jerk.

They said out of 24 people starting the class, 6 finished and only 2 made a B.

The people who dropped the class left the CS program and some transferred schools.

He explained the grading process.

They also told me that assignments were graded by an autograder.

We would submit our source file to a scripted process that would run it against the professor’s sample data. Grading was pass or fail.

If you passed on your first try you got a 100.

If you failed, the script would tell you the general source of the failure, such as failed to compile, incorrect output, or memory error.

That’s all you had to go on to figure out where you went wrong.

You could re-submit for a grade 10 points lower.

You had 5 attempts to get it right, which would give you a 60.

Everyone failed the first task.

After a couple of weeks learning the basics we were given our first problem.

The task was to open a file, read numbers from it, and print them out.

I finished it pretty quickly.

It was returned from the autograder with “incorrect output”.

We weren’t shown the actual or expected output, we were only told it didn’t match.

The students from last semester said it was the same problem as last time.

NO ONE ever got it right and the professor never explained it.

He found the professor’s data.

I combed through my code and could find nothing that would cause a failure.

I put on my thinking cap. We were working on a Linux server and the sample data had to be out there somewhere.

I navigated to the professor’s folder and got a warning about unauthorized access, but it didn’t tell me access denied like it did if I tried to go to a classmate’s folder.

I deduced the directory structure and discovered every assignment was in its own folder, and the folders were not secured.

I found not only the sample data, but an expected output file. Score!

He figured out why everyone failed the first assignment.

I copied all the assignment folders to a USB drive, then opened the first one.

In the data he had negative, multiple-digit, and decimal numbers.

There were also numbers with letters embedded, which the output file indicated he wanted us to reject.

At this point in the coursework we had only read single characters from files.

This was way beyond the scope of what we had been taught, and it is no wonder no one figured it out last semester.

It was a whole series of bull “gotchas,” and I was mad.

He was the first person to ever get an A in the class.

I went back to the professor and said, “The only way I’m not producing the correct output is if the input numbers are not single digit positive integers. That’s all we have covered in class, so if that is the expectation it would be pretty underhanded of you.”

The professor smirked and condescendingly said, “It only says to read the lines with numbers. It doesn’t give a sign or length, does it? And you have access to the full textbook. You need to learn to use all your resources.”

I fixed my program, resubmitted it, and got back a pass with a score of 90.

I got 100s with a few 90s (just to throw him off) on everything else, and earned the first A he had ever given in that class.

I think he suspected what I did, or maybe he had log files to confirm it, but he never said anything and neither did I.

It seems like that professor needs to be reported for intentionally tricking students and causing them to fail

. His job is to teach not to expect students to learn the entire textbook on their own before their first test.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story…

His revenge wasn’t extreme enough.

This wasn’t really revenge.

This professor didn’t do his job.

This reader confronted a professor who never gave As.

It would’ve been a better ending if the professor had lost his job.

Just sayin.

If you liked that story, read this one about grandparents who set up a college fund for their grandkid because his parents won’t, but then his parents want to use the money to cover sibling’s medical expenses.