The aim of this study was to analyze the tendency of students to approach programming assignments superficially and focus on fulfilling given requirements rather than focusing on deeper considerations of code quality. The analysis was conducted with a group of N = 108 students who completed the first assignment in the Advanced Web Development course in the first year of the master's program in computing. The analysis of their code revealed several characteristic bad practices, notably the exposure of sensitive data in public repositories (39%), the incorrect or non-existent use of the .gitignore file (34%), resulting in large repositories full of generated files, and the over-architecting of what should be a simple web application (32%), the last example being similar to Maslow’s hammer principle, where students tend to solve problems in the way they have previously learned rather than expanding their programming knowledge. The analysis showed no correlation between the occurrence of bad practices and successfully implemented features, suggesting that there is a tendency to optimize their work that minimally meets the criteria with a lack of self-control in coding habits.

Keywords: Programming, homework, bad practices, code quality.