I wonder if your students are new enough at programming that they don&#x27;t understand what exact matching means? Even if you verbally say &quot;exact match&quot; they may not have enough context to realize that means character by character examination.<p>We&#x27;ve done programming long enough that this is ingrained to a very deep degree, but for them, it still looks like english.<p>Anecdote: I had a college instructor who thought it was reasonable to write a TCP-IP program from scratch without reference using Winsock2. I&#x27;m sure he could do it, and I could probably do it <i>now</i>, but as a student, not so much.