text: An alternate reason why the teacher-designed summer assignments are more effective than other assignments is the resources provided for the assignment. Throughout the summer, students can ask teachers questions via email. Because there is a uniform assignment across all students, students are able to not only ask for help from a teacher but also from their fellow peers who are taking the class with them and have the same assignment. Teachers can answer questions about the assignment faster because they know what they are looking for. Students that are taking the same class would have designed their own summer assignments, and would be unable to help each other because their assignments would be different. In the summer before AP Computer Science, I was given an assignment to build a program that would display the class roster. This assignment was up to the student to design; there were no guidelines given by the teacher. After about a week, I was able to manufacture a working program on my own. However, my friends were unable to complete the assignment. I tried to help, but their code was so drastically different from mine that I couldn't understand it. If the assignment wasn't difficult enough, the teacher notified us that because all documentation is online, he would not be available for questions. This is a prime example of how student-designed summer assignments is a disaster. The assignment ended up not graded and was a waste of time since it did not provide the students with an effective revisit of the prerequisite course.