I don’t mean to sound cynical, but it’s possible that these students simply got away with this strategy for their entire academic “career” up to that point. I.e. complain about the difficulty of the task, throw your hands up, ask for “help” enough times until the teacher basically solves/explains the entire problem for you and then just copy their exact solution.
The idea that a teacher should ever touch a student keyboard in a computer science or programming class to me is absurd.
> The idea that a teacher should ever touch a student keyboard in a computer science or programming class to me is absurd.
I agree.
In this case, the students who seemed to work this way were mostly (all?) ESL students, and none of the tutors spoke the native language of the students. So it could be difficult even to indicate what you wanted them to look at, and it was especially frustrating when the errors they were dealing with were trivial syntax errors.
The idea that a teacher should ever touch a student keyboard in a computer science or programming class to me is absurd.