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> Professors aren't in the habit of repeatedly changing the assignment out from under you while you're halfway finished

That would be quite interesting in terms of "real world" education. The unfortunate thing is that most terms/semesters are only a few months long and so work has to be very explicitly defined and scoped to be achievable in that time with the expectation of the student spending maybe 10 hours a week on any one class, tops.

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I'd love to see that. Give everyone an assignment on day one. Nice and easy and due in 10 days. Then in 9 days extend the project scope. Require collaboration and then set the due date +10 again. Just keep repeating until the final submission when you programmatically test and grade every assignment in front of the whole class with a "big bang" style "deployment"

I think it would be too real for the kids.

Another unfortunate thing in this context is that coursework is almost always greenfield development of small projects.

Coming up to speed on a large existing code base of inconsistent quality and style is another enormously important job skill, as is writing code that can be maintained by the person who has to come up to speed on your code a year later, but you'll never get those skills from writing small precisely-specified programs from scratch.

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