It is common for students to say that they are not quite sure what are the exact requirements of a course. Though I struggle with the contrasting hope that I will be clear, but also allow for a variety of ways towards satisfying the requirements, I have also come to realize that full specificity is not possible for fundamental reasons best explored in recent sociology by Harold Garfinkel in the first part of his chapter on instructions and particularly on the writing/reading of instruction manuals (of which descriptions of class requirements are an instance):

Complaints will go to the manual's incompleteness, ambiguity, equivocality, errors, mistakes, gaps, omissions, the recalcitrant teacher, sloppy craft, metaphoric description, lies, and the rest of endless whatnot.

Recurrently, in vivo, maps and manuals present their users the in vivo witnessed incompetence of the text. In vivo the manual offers a reader anything but just what is needed. The way the text fails you, just the thing that you want from it, which you must have, now, just here, just where you are in your project—of that trouble it is guaranteed that it will be there waiting for you, but there is no way in the world of prespecifying the conditions under which it is going to intrude upon your local island of order. That means that you have to be in the course of the action, and just there, just because, and just in the way you need more than anything in the world just this from the text, and it is in that, and in the way you want it and need it, that you cannot have it.

(Garfinkel 2002: 205)

In other words there is no way I can know the problem you will have with my instructions in the context (time, place, co-participants) when you will come to doubt whether you are doing "what Varenne wants."

The only (partial) solution is come and talk to me about your doubts. This often clears the doubt as I can say (indexically) "'that' which you are doing is 'that' I will take as an instance of what I want."

Note that it has been very rare that students have eventually produced something that was not "what I want."