Oh no! That's too harsh!

Lecturer:

Just to check, this was your program that you submitted, yes?

Student:

Yes.

Lecturer:

And you ran the tests with this program?

Student:

Yes.

Lecturer:

Now, this program doesn't compile. You ran the tests with your program even though it doesn't compile?

Student:

Well I ran it on someone else's machine.

Lecturer:

I'm not interested in what machine you ran it on, I'm interested in which program you ran. How can you have run your program at all if it doesn't compile?

Student:

I ran a different program.

Lecturer:

You weren't meant to be testing some other program, you were meant to be testing this one. That's what you submitted for your assignment work.

Student burbles some complete nonsense.

Lecturer:

Well I'm going to give you a penalty. Zero marks for this assignment.

Lecturer:

Oh no, that's too much, that's too harsh.

Student seems to fail to grasp that, with a non-working program, test results which don't match, nothing else of value in the submission, even without the penalty, the mark would have been zero anyway. Not only is the penalty not harsh, being no penalty at all, it's an extremely generous, considering it's against University rules to hand in false test results!