Very insightful and true. Even during a conversation, many people "translate" what they hear into something else, and will quote back, a few seconds later, a totally different sentence and think that's exactly what you said.
Kids in school often don't read assignments properly either, and skip everything until the first question. I don't know if they think it saves them time or fear there's a trick somewhere that they will avoid that way.
In life in general, people like ambiguity; it helps to smooth things out. But in programming it's a problem.
I think it's a profound fear of ambiguity that drives these behaviors: the urge is to move past the 'understanding' part by finding some single interpretation and then move on to the 'doing' part, which is the satisfying part. I think formally writing down the specification for any kind of work starts with holding all the ambiguities in of it in your head. In this case, the approach depends on whether the student is more interested in 'computer programming' or 'software engineering'
Kids in school often don't read assignments properly either, and skip everything until the first question. I don't know if they think it saves them time or fear there's a trick somewhere that they will avoid that way.
In life in general, people like ambiguity; it helps to smooth things out. But in programming it's a problem.