[anthonyb]

Sorry - that was sort of my point, but I didn't put it very well. Your student likely isn't taking any of that into account. One way to get your point across is to ask them a few pointed questions about (eg.) the data set that they're sorting. If it's relatively small, then the overhead of quicksort might not be worth it. If it's already mostly sorted, then bubblesort is potentially better, and so on.