[ghaff]

The main issue is that you can give any guidelines you want but a ton of people will take "Don't spend more than 4 hours on this" with an implied nudge/nudge/wink/wink.

That said, as I wrote elsewhere, if you can't pull a reasonable version of a work product out of a folder, I may be asking you to create one. I'm not necessarily talking code but I absolutely am looking for some proof that you can do the work if it's not already in the wild.

[mrj]

I have had this problem and my assignments really stress that it doesn't even have to be done, we can look at in the meeting and possibly finish small parts together or talk about work that'd be done. But still people do sometimes do far too much and it's not the positive signal they think it is.