After reviewing the exams, I must address several issues that emerged very clearly during the marking process.
As Professor @MarcoRianiUNIPR already mentioned, some of the submitted solutions were absurd. I would go further: several were not only incorrect but also embarrassing from a basic programming‑practice perspective.
A few critical points:
Some students did not even load the dataset yet still produced “results” in their scripts. This is simply impossible. If the data is not loaded, MATLAB cannot generate any output. Such submissions indicate that the code was not written, tested, or understood by the student.
Basic file‑naming rules were ignored. Several MATLAB files were saved with spaces or dots in the filename. When you do this, MATLAB cannot run the script. This is fundamental knowledge expected from anyone attending this course.
Students who received zero marks did so because their entire code was clearly generated by large language models. The structure, the errors, and the lack of connection to the dataset make this extremely easy to detect.
Some scripts contained more than 200 lines of code written in 75 minutes. This is not realistic and further confirms the use of generative tools without understanding.
The attached screenshot is one such example of code produced by a large language model, including lines such as “I asked you what I should print here and you told me the numeric data names so here it is”, which no student would reasonably write during an exam.
This is a serious reminder: your future depends on the skills you build now. Please take exams
seriously. Exams are designed to help you learn, not to be outsourced.
After reviewing the exams, I must address several issues that emerged very clearly during the marking process.
As Professor @MarcoRianiUNIPR already mentioned, some of the submitted solutions were absurd. I would go further: several were not only incorrect but also embarrassing from a basic programming‑practice perspective.
A few critical points:
Some students did not even load the dataset yet still produced “results” in their scripts. This is simply impossible. If the data is not loaded, MATLAB cannot generate any output. Such submissions indicate that the code was not written, tested, or understood by the student.
Basic file‑naming rules were ignored. Several MATLAB files were saved with spaces or dots in the filename. When you do this, MATLAB cannot run the script. This is fundamental knowledge expected from anyone attending this course.
Students who received zero marks did so because their entire code was clearly generated by large language models. The structure, the errors, and the lack of connection to the dataset make this extremely easy to detect.
Some scripts contained more than 200 lines of code written in 75 minutes. This is not realistic and further confirms the use of generative tools without understanding.
The attached screenshot is one such example of code produced by a large language model, including lines such as “I asked you what I should print here and you told me the numeric data names so here it is”, which no student would reasonably write during an exam.
This is a serious reminder: your future depends on the skills you build now. Please take exams
seriously. Exams are designed to help you learn, not to be outsourced.