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As someone that was a student until last year, the real hard problem is that we have teachers that want this type of comments. Having different standards for different teachers the same day is a lot of context switching...

A better idea would be to get a standard code style for all course...

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My school actually had standard coding styles for each language they taught. Naturally, they all wanted a metric fuckton of comments (luckily the TAs didn't care as much about the comments part of those guides).

Particularly with beginners, I think there's a lot of "What were they thinking when they wrote this??" going on when a professor or TA reads code that is completely unintuitive (Take a look at /r/learnprogramming for some examples). Having comments everywhere makes it easy to say, "Oh! S/he was trying to reset all of the variables in the program by calling main(null); (actual example from the subreddit). How would you ever know that without a comment explaining why main(null); is called in the middle of a class?

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