I'd hate the idea of having a record of all my mistakes as a student. I'd probably just use a separate remote for my develop branch and squash into one commit when merging to master.
Mistakes is how you learn, and (unfortunately) how you prove you're doing the work (read: the learning) yourself and aren't just copying answers or having someone else do it for you.
In a classroom setting, you don't have to pretend to be perfect. You have to learn. Perfection, polished history, etc is something you can save for your future career.
NC State uses GitHub Enterprise for the CS2, Data Structures, and Software Development courses with testing occuring on a Jenkins CI server. From my experience, student's are fine making multiple commits and appreciate the immediate feedback. Most development is done offline, though there is some attempt to game the system toward the final submission, but it's mostly done by incrementally passing teaching staff test cases.
Overall, I think this is a well received release, since it's something I know many students have appreciated in the past rather than waiting a week for teachers to grade their code.
Personally, I've found it really useful to look at student's intermediate commits. I don't judge them on it in any way, but it's extremely useful for seeing how the students are thinking about a given problem.
Seeing your mistakes might be useful in reassuring the teacher that you did the work yourself, rather than simply plagiarising the solution from somewhere else.
Git just isn't the right tool for that. If I were to use this as a student, I would push nicely sanitized and consistent history after thoroughly rebasing, amending and fixup-ing my mistakes on my local clone.
There's nothing this too can do to prevent me from doing this.
If the teacher then judges the submission by also looking at the history, I will have an unfair advantage by just having read and internalized got features.
It does. First hand experience when after couple of months of not showing any progress student shows up with completed assignment coded using constructs which where not even taught in lectures... and when asked, can not modify a thing.
I was mostly joking in my previous comment, but i know students (including myself) that have occasionally submitted assignments as a single commit passing all test cases using “novel” constructs…of course, we can readily modify it if asked to.
In a classroom setting, you don't have to pretend to be perfect. You have to learn. Perfection, polished history, etc is something you can save for your future career.