[tnecniv]

While I tend to grade generously when instructions aren’t followed, it is a real pain. It takes a lot more time to grade an assignment when someone does not follow the requested protocol. It’s likely to me that the prof saw a mess of printed code, said “I don’t have time to untangle this and grade it properly,” and didn’t give credit. Hell, I’ve wanted to do that on many an occasion but a fault of mine is that I am not respectful of my time and will try to help the student out by finding a way to award them points even if it takes 10x longer than it should have if they followed instructions.

I can sympathize that bad assignments are tedious and you might know a better way to do them, but you can’t expect to get credit when you don’t follow the instructions.