My instructor in the introductory programming course informed us that yes, the grader did indeed read our source code, and check to make sure we'd commented it meaningfully.
I decided to test this assertion.
The program in question was trivial - it was one of those contrived examples of how OOP works, a "Kennel" which had "Dog" objects which possessed various traits, and would bark() or wag(), stuff like that.
I obfuscated the code as much as I could - indentation all over the place, line breaks in inappropriate places, code hidden inside multi-line comments, and multiple dummy variables named one character off from the useful variables. The useful variables had names like "satrtrek," "maryppopins" and "pizza." The dummies were "startrek" and "marypoppins."
This exercise taught me nothing about writing code, but because my code gave the expected output, I still got an A. Source code comments from then on were made only as needed.
The next semester, I got an email from a friend of mine who just couldn't get his head around what was supposed to be going on. He asked whether I'd kept the source to one particular program, so that he could review it and see if he couldn't make sense of the assignment.
I had indeed kept it, and just sent the .java files to him without opening them for review. By coincidence, the program he was stuck on was the one I'd obfuscated. He switched his major to Math and Spanish for what I believe to be unrelated reasons.
I decided to test this assertion.
The program in question was trivial - it was one of those contrived examples of how OOP works, a "Kennel" which had "Dog" objects which possessed various traits, and would bark() or wag(), stuff like that.
I obfuscated the code as much as I could - indentation all over the place, line breaks in inappropriate places, code hidden inside multi-line comments, and multiple dummy variables named one character off from the useful variables. The useful variables had names like "satrtrek," "maryppopins" and "pizza." The dummies were "startrek" and "marypoppins."
This exercise taught me nothing about writing code, but because my code gave the expected output, I still got an A. Source code comments from then on were made only as needed.
The next semester, I got an email from a friend of mine who just couldn't get his head around what was supposed to be going on. He asked whether I'd kept the source to one particular program, so that he could review it and see if he couldn't make sense of the assignment.
I had indeed kept it, and just sent the .java files to him without opening them for review. By coincidence, the program he was stuck on was the one I'd obfuscated. He switched his major to Math and Spanish for what I believe to be unrelated reasons.