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At least they did in the 20th century when I graduated from an ABET-accredited engineering school.

"What is ABET?

ABET is a nonprofit, non-governmental organization that accredits college and university programs in applied and natural science, computing, engineering and engineering technology."

From their requirements for accrediting engineering schools:

"General Criterion 3. Student Outcomes

The program must have documented student outcomes that prepare graduates to attain the program educational objectives.
Student outcomes are outcomes (a) through (k) plus any additional outcomes that may be articulated by the program.
-snip-
(c) an ability to design a system, component, or process to meet desired needs within realistic constraints such as economic, environmental, social, political, ethical, health and safety, manufacturability, and sustainability
-snip-
(f) an understanding of professional and ethical responsibility"

At least they did in the 20th century when I graduated from an ABET-accredited engineering school.

"What is ABET?

ABET is a nonprofit, non-governmental organization that accredits college and university programs in applied and natural science, computing, engineering and engineering technology."

From their requirements for accrediting engineering schools:

"General Criterion 3. Student Outcomes

The program must have documented student outcomes that prepare graduates to attain the program educational objectives.
Student outcomes are outcomes (a) through (k) plus any additional outcomes that may be articulated by the program.
-snip-
(c) an ability to design a system, component, or process to meet desired needs within realistic constraints such as economic, environmental, social, political, ethical, health and safety, manufacturability, and sustainability
-snip-
(f) an understanding of professional and ethical responsibility"

Do they still teach assembly language?

The ABET accreditation for a computer science degree requires:
"Coverage of the fundamentals of algorithms, data structures, software design, concepts of programming languages and computer organization and architecture."
per: http://www.abet.org/accreditat...

The last part - "computer organization and architecture" - can be interpreted a number of different ways. For my alma mater, they met that requirement by creating a course titled "Computer Organization and Assembly Language": https://www.csc.ncsu.edu/acade....

So yes - but YMMV based on individual university.

My point was this: if you're taking a C++ class, you're typically choosing the programming route (a CS degree), not one of the many other disciplines (designers, modellers, animators, texture artists, concept artists, writers, audio engineers, production, etc).

Sadly, You can no longer take a C++ class at most universities in the United States. You can take a "Databases using C++", and be expected to learn C++ on your own, but of course, that's much more likely to be "Databases using Java" these days.

The ABET standards first changed in 1985 to discourage teaching of programming languages in classes which count towards a CS degree, and again in 1994, and again in 2006.

http://www.abet.org/DisplayTem...

Currently, ABET accreditation is "Outcome Based", a criterion which has been abandoned as hopelessly flawed in primary education for both math and reading:

General Criterion 3. Student Outcomes" ...

No where does it require proficiency in a programming language or other language, and in fact, it goes so far as to limit the requirement to reading about them - "exposure" - in section II:

Program Criteria for Computer Science and Simililarly Named Computing Programs ...
Student Outcomes ...
Curriculum

Students must have the following amounts of course work or equivalent educational experience:

a. Computer science: One and one-third years that must include: ...
2. An exposure to a variety of programming languages and systems. [CS]

In other words, your graduates don't need to be able to program, they don't need to be able to do explicit memory management, they don't have to understand pointers, they don't have to understand, at least basically, that for a given compiler input, here's the assembly language you are likely to get out, etc..

It's pretty pitiful the amount of (non) effort required to get a CS degree at many U.S. Colleges and Universities.

The good news is that they have degree programs where the contracts with the department actually require learning computer languages.

The bad news is that there's only a handful of places that have these programs, such as Brown, Rice, Stanford, MIT, CMU, and so on.

The good news is that if you attend one of these handful of universities, AND you opt into the degree program that actually forces you to learn to use the tools, and use a computer as a tool, in more than a theoretical, abstract way, AND you do well, you are practically guaranteed a job at a top tier company, like Google, Facebook, Apple, etc.. The bad news is that these places tend to be a heck of a lot more expensive than a community college.

The good news is that there's nothing preventing a community college from adopting the same "in excess of ABET requirements" for one of their CS degree options.

The bad news is that, while nothing prevents it, they are all sitting on their thumbs and not doing it.

The good news is that if you learned in a non-ABET manner AND you did well, e.g. at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, you are also pretty much guaranteed a job.

The bad news is that those jobs are from H1B workers from Germany, and you're a U.S. citizen who is buying or who has bought your education from the wrong vendor, and it's too late for you.

The good news is, Starbucks is hiring!

I have never, ever, ever seen a course catalog that lists CS 201 FORTRAN PROGRAMMING.

I guess it's "bear in the woods" time...

That is because you are a kid who learned after 1986 in the U.S., after they changed the accreditation standards, and caused the next crop of CS graduates to not have learned programming languages specifically (i.e. caused then to learn their tools, as opposed to "learn the tools on your own and apply them to a problem domain"). That change is one of the reasons it's frequently more useful to hire people graduating from European Universities than U.S. Universities, and why we need so many H1-B visas for those folks: U.S. Students know theory, but can't code, because they don't know how to use their tools, unless they come out of a college or university that offers non-acreddited language courses on top of the rest of the curriculum - e.g. Rice University, Brown University, and so on, or they otherwise mastered (not just learned) them on their own.

https://archive.org/details/co...
Illinois State University course catalog, 1982 - Pg 53 - Applied Computer Science Courses
164 INTRODUCTION TO FORTRAN PROGRAMMING
169 INFORMATION PROCESSING USING PL/1
265 JOB CONTROL LANGUAGE
272 COBOL AS A SECOND LANGUAGE
274 PL/1 AS A SECOND LANGUAGE
283 ASSEMBLER LANGUAGE PROGRAMMING
288 ADVANCED ASSEMBLER LANGUAGE PROGRAMMING

CS Used to be taught very differently than it is today. Today, ABET Accreditation requires that you implement "Outcome Based Courses", which means that it's really not about coding any more, it's about documenting a process, and then documenting that you followed that process. See also:

ABET - Criteria for Accrediting Computing Programs, 2012 - 2013
http://www.abet.org/DisplayTem...

Anyone worth hiring today that graduated with a U.S. CS degree in the last two and a half decades graduated from one of a handful of universities with "Extra requirements" that include actually learning specific computer languages, or included self-directed programs, where one of the options was learning one or more specific computer languages. Or they have been involved in one or more large Open Source projects where participation required that they learn one or more specific computer languages, and that they actually participated more than tangentially in the project.

I've seen many outstanding U.S. candidates, as an interviewer, and either they graduated before 1986-1988, OR they went to one of those universities, OR they participated heavily in an Open Source project. Very few not in one (or more) of those buckets were what I would call "top tier candidates".

Example: I pick a random POSIX-2001 function (let's not worry about all the large file cruft and other APIs that came about because some OS vendors were to lazy to implement per-thread working directories or credentials; we'll make it easy). Can you describe it's parameters and return values without looking at the man page? OK, that might not be entirely fair; random might get me something like "poll", with structure inputs, etc. -- how about if I picked 8 of them; could you describe the parameters and outputs of at least 8 of them?

I think the answer for most people on that question will be "no" - because they don't know the libraries in the UNIX Programming Environment, which are one of their most important tools. These are the people most likely to implement their own version of strncmp(3) because they don't realize that there's an existing function that solves the problem. They are the people who aren't going to realize that asprintf(3) allocated memory which they are responsible for freeing later, intil the memory leak in their code bites them in the butt.

If you want to say "But I don't program a UNIX system, I program Windows!", I invite you to explain CoCreateFreeThreadedMarshaler(

One of the bigger problems with accreditation is the scope of examination needed to determine suitability for official certification. If I were to certify someone as an electrical engineer without any knowledge of what their education was, I'd want to spend a full week working one-on-one with them to fully evaluate their knowledge and skills. This is why universities get accreditation from a group like ABET. Now you can tell graduates to have several years of work experience, take the FE and PE exams, and be able to tell with a reasonable amount of certainty whether or not the individual is worthy to be called a Professional Engineer with a good efficiency in the process (vs. the aforementioned one-on-one situation). Does anyone have any better ideas for large-scale, education-irrelevant accreditation?

The BSSE is what you want. There are 22 schools in the USA that offer the degree at this time.

A good technical college or university will be ABET accredited (abet.org) you can search for the school name here: http://main.abet.org/aps/Accreditedprogramsearch.aspx. HINT: search on full school names, not abbreviations. I know hiring managers that will not even look at a resume if it lists a non-accredited school, like ITT, or ECPI.

That very closely matches the course curriculum I had at UT Dallas in CS. I took a pure CS track.

Our CS department is attached to the School of Engineering and our degree programs are certified/accredited by ABET which I suppose imposes these standards on the curriculum.

To take the PE license exam you must have a 4 year degree from an ABET school.

MIT and UCB are ABET : http://main.abet.org/aps/AccreditedProgramsDetails.aspx?OrganizationID=41 http://main.abet.org/aps/AccreditedProgramsDetails.aspx?OrganizationID=368

.

To take the PE license exam you must have a 4 year degree from an ABET school.

MIT and UCB are ABET : http://main.abet.org/aps/AccreditedProgramsDetails.aspx?OrganizationID=41 http://main.abet.org/aps/AccreditedProgramsDetails.aspx?OrganizationID=368

.

"I went to DeVry a while back and it was no cake-walk. To earn my CIS degree, the was a while back, but we had courses covering programming, databases, online systems, systems analysis.

Oh, I believe you, Emperor Shaddam IV!

Per the Accredited Programs Search feature of http://www.abet.org/ (formerly the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, now just ABET Inc), DeVry has accredited Technology (TAC) programs. Being ABET-accredited programs, graduates of those DeVry programs have worked their asses off, IMHO!

However, per the same search feature, DeVry does *not* have any accredited Engineering (EAC) programs

My comment in the submission was an attempt to highlight how the author slams China for counting the graduates of non-Engineering programs as "Engineers" while not calling out the US for doing the same exact thing!

Math and Physics majors have to work their asses off to graduate, yet nobody considers them to be "Engineers"...

Here are some statements with supporting compiled statistics.
The purpose of these statements is to demonstrate that the WWU CSci department is a very good department with needs within WA state. It's existence is still well within the stated purpose goals of WWU (something like "high qualtiy education","serve the needs of WA residents").

The WWU CSci department has a quality curriculum and excellent graduates.
+ accredited CSci Bachelors program from Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) . http://www.abet.org/AccredProgramSearch/AccreditationSearch.aspx (do a search by State)
+ Among 177 graduates from scores of the ETS® Major Field Test for Computer Science between Winter 2007 and Winter 2011 (inclusive), results were:
++ Mean (average): 166.2
++ Median (middle score): 167
++ Mode (most common score): 170
++ According to http://www.ets.org/Media/Tests/MFT/pdf/MFT%20PDFs%202007/ComputerScience4CMF.pdf
+++ The 90th percentile for individuals starts at 173.
56 of 177 students scored 173 or better.
+++ The 95th percentile for individuals starts at 179.
31 of 177 students scored 179 or better.
+++ The 95th percentile for institutions (based on mean score) starts at 164.
+ WWU Collegiate Cyber Defense team took second (a very close second) to UW (who went on to win nationals) at the Pacific Rim Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition
https://www.piersystem.com/go/doc/1538/1053947/WWU-Team-Places-Second-at-4th-Annual-Pacific-Rim-Collegiate-Cyber-Defense-Competition

The WWU CSci department cost is slightly below average for an engineering department at WWU.
+ Among departments within the WWU College of Sciences and Technology, the Computer Science department uses
++ the average amount of State funds (roughly)
++ has the 2nd highest student contributions to it's cost (10%).
From page 93 of WWU OPERATING BUDGET FISCAL YEAR 2011

There is a demonstrable need for Computer Science.
+ Computer science has the highest field related employment and average salary of any degree WWU offers (after lumping education departments together).
From http://www.careers.wwu.edu/surveyapplicationX/statusdefaultXX.asp (concluded by J Anderson)

Thanks to C Reedy, J Bucher, N Fitzgerald, B Costa, JT Moon, J Anderson for statistics,

-J_Tom_Moon_79 '00-'-05

off-topic political point: I am partial to the view that the state should not be involved in education. However, state planning is the reality and I'm not debating that with this post. The fact remains, the WWU CSci department provides a very high quality education for a needed discipline (albeit, paid by WA state residents and businesses that may or may not have any interest in such a program).

Engineers are not usually required to take the wide variety of non-technical courses that are supposed to give lib arts majors a grounding in history, art, social sciences, languages, etc

Any ABET Certified Engineering curricula is going to need to ground their Engineers in history, art, social sciences, etc.
From the 2010-2011 Criteria for Accrediting Engineering Programs:

Engineering programs must demonstrate that their students attain the following outcomes:

...

        the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global,
economic, environmental, and societal context

...

Real bricks and mortar Universities with Engineering programs have requirements for engineers to take classes in history, art, social sciences. In the United States these include graduation requirement for a foreign language.

Now, you can argue that these required classes don't give any non-technical grounding, but engineers will have to take those courses.

Of course, music for non-majors isn't going to mint a Brahms or a Stravinsky. Just like how a semester of Calculus for Poets (where they spend 3-4 months going over the first 15 minutes of a normal Calculus class) isn't going to teach you what you need to know to build a bomb.

In comparison, I've heard Introduction to Organic Chemistry described as 'trying to stink things up without blowing your head off.' But then Chemical Engineering majors always struck me as the special kids.

Oooo, you're feisty.

You say you're the best at programming? Interesting. Have you ever heard of VHDL, or Verilog?

Okay, let's take this a step at a time...

they made me go early since I was so smart

I'm sure "they" held you at gunpoint.

forget that CS theory bullshit

Ah, you're kind of like me. I'm not a big fan of theory, I prefer the application of theory, for which it helps to know a bit of theory.

Or maybe they got lucky and wasted thousands of dollars on learning about Shakespear, atoms, Africa, grammar, and how to turn on a computer instead

Oh! Oh! You forgot to mention expressing their thoughts in a coherent way using paragraphs!

and finally got to programming in year 3

I dunno what four year colleges you looked at, but CS majors where I graduated from were doing C++ their first semester. VB was for the business students, who couldn't cut it in a real programming class. By year 3, we had been taught a few different languages...Java, C#, ASP, etc.

I'll be better at doing my job than any 4 year idiot with a CS degree

Yes, your training may be superior for your job. CS degrees from a good university are certainly superior for other careers.

Oh, right. As far as maxing out the cores, you're relying on a great deal of compiler and hardware mojo that you most likely never learned about. If you can fit your program in the register set, awesome, you can prolly max it out. If you go to L1 cache you'll prolly still be close, but if you can't fit in the L1 your program is going to block on I/O a lot.

You also forget about things like time-sharing pre-emptive operating system kernels which will boot your threads out every now and then, and probably block on some I/O while they're at it.

If I knew every command there was

Aah, the naivete of it all...knowing every command only gets you so far. You must have a skill for learning, and that you will keep you sailing well for a while. But it's the interactions of the commands, the intricacies of the architecture you target, the little things which will haunt you.

Finally, how do you define "the best at programming"? Can you program embedded systems? Certainly the best programmer could target any architecture, and not just a PC...

When you can design memory-mapped peripherals in an FPGA for a USB microcontroller, program the micro to do data acquisition with the FPGA, wire up all the circuits, connect it to a PC, and write a multi-threaded PC application to log the data from the device, then we'll talk about being "the best". I am able to do all these activites thanks to the four-year degree I acquired from an ABET accredited institution. Excluding the circuit design (which is more like a CAD sorta thing) all of the above tasks are programming tasks.

In order to qualify for federal funds, colleges must meet federal mandates for levels of education.

And in order to stay accredited in the field of engineering, a school must hold itself accountable to ABET whose standards are not lacking. Without accreditation at the time of graduation the piece of paper stating that I am a mechanical/aerospace engineer is worthless. Hence despite the fact that anyone with a 20-something ACT can get into the school I graduated from, not just anyone can graduate from its engineering program. And those who excel are further rewarded with scholarships and reserarch assistanceships based on academic performance.

The above, informative, post covered general accreditation. In addition, there is accreditation in specific disciplines. The Accreditation Board for Engineering Technology, http://www.abet.org/ , does CS and EE. Their site has a list.

Accreditation is not required, and some excellent schools haven't bothered to get it. However, below the top 20 in the country, not having accreditation is a bad sign.

Disclaimer: I am an accredited accreditor.

1. Pay teachers very well so they are in say the top 5% of all wage earners. This will attract the highly skilled and educated back into teaching.

2. Send teachers to school during school holidays to further their own knowledge. Pay them for this. This ensures teachers are constantly updating their knowledge instead of driving taxi's during the school breaks.

3. Don't let your local community decide what should be taught in schools. Curriculum should be decided by a national panel made up of leaders in each field of study. Education should be a national issue, not one decided based on local beliefs no matter how "intelligent" those beliefs are.

4. Provide options for traineeships in traditional trades (e.g. electrical, plumbing etc) for the non-academic students. This will help remove disruptive elements from classes allowing those who want to study or have the aptitude to study to do so in peace. (not that you don't need to study to become a plumber and such, but I'm sure you all know what I mean)

5. Properly fund the schools and get rid of the Coke/Chip machines. I know the sugary drinks and food taste great, but they don't help you sit still and concentrate. (A new slogan perhaps? :)

6. Ban the teaching of religion on any and all school grounds. AND ENFORCE IT!!! Religion has it's place in society, but not in schools!

(no pun intended). If you go to an accredited 4 year computer science program, you learn computer science. That is, math, theory, algorithms, logic, etc. that applies to computers. However, the actual accreditation criteria:

(http://www.abet.org/Linked%20Documents-UPDATE/Cri teria%20and%20PP/05-06-CAC%20Criteria.pdf) [PDF],

states that the student must be exposed to a variety of systems and languages (and that they must become proficient in at least one programming language). Computer science isn't very interesting or beneficial if the "computer" (i.e., specific computer system running a real OS and applications) is not there. If you attend a 4 year, accredited computer science program in the US, you get MUCH more than what a vocational school would give you.

This is absolutely terrible!! I am myself going through college at a Big Ten university working on a degree in Electrical Engineering Technology and I see this as a major problem. In my degree program, I was required to take a C programming course for use in a microcontrollers class. Nothing wrong with that, but due to the politics involved, the CS department (NOT in the School of Technology) would not teach the students. However, the Computer Technology department (IN the School of Technology) was obligated to handle it since they teach "programming" to their own students. However, the C programming course was far below par. I had taken a CS course in C programming at a different school before transferring (but the credit didn't transfer) so I compared the two. There simply is no comparison. How far into the semester should an introductory C course introduce the concept of functions and how to use them? A week? Maybe two at the most? It was less than two weeks in the CS course. In the CPT course, it was 9 weeks. Ridiculous.

But it gets worse. Because of even more politics and an attempt to streamline the program, the C programming was shifted into the first 5 weeks of the EET microcontrollers class. Now, instead of a semester of poor instruction by Computer Technology professors, we have EET professors teaching C programming in just 5 weeks. It's no wonder nobody in the EET micro courses is comfortable just sitting down and coding! To most of them, it's a struggle for dear life to write the simplest of functions. I have witnessed this first hand and helped many of these kids. I feel terrible for them because it really isn't their fault they aren't capable of the level of programming required of them. These kids need at LEAST a full semester of CS level introductory C programming. A second semester dealing with data structures wouldn't hurt either!

Unless we can get an accrediting organization like ABET http://www.abet.org/ to require these non-CS degree programs to provide CS level introductory programming classes, we will continue to see this type of change. I really think these students need to see that programming as taught in other programs is not necessarily programming, but just an introduction to the concepts of what can be done with programming skills.

Now, the examples above are indicative of a single program at a single university and not of all non-CS programs in all universities. But my intuition says this is probably not a lone case. I think it is imperative that we make sure these kids understand that they need to evaluate the differences between the programming taught in various programs before dumping CS. You can always double major or go for the BS in CS and an AS in another field. The BS degree in CS will go very far actually. Don't let the hype lead you astray. The AS degree will allow you to break out later or even get into other fields from the start. You can even get a BS in CS and a masters or doctorate in another field. Don't disregard any option!

So, I think either the accrediting institutions need to enforce some standardization in degree programs across the board,...

They do. There's a Computing Accreditation Commission arm of the ABET. Their criteria is at http://www.abet.org/criteria_cac.html.

This commission was relatively new at the time I graduated high screwl, and I chose my college partly because it was one of only two so far in my state to have gotten its CS program accredited.

I think that "very few" is a stretch. They accept all Computer Science degrees that are accreditted by ABET/CSAC

We already have people to decide who is and is not a journalist - for example, the Canadian Association of Journalists, the International Federation of Journalists, and so on. This is how real journalists get press passes, by the way - they join the associations, which check their credentials, and issue passes.

The Canadian Assn. of Journalists (CAJ): the only requirement for membership is filling out a form and paying a fee. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) membership is through national organizations which are members of the IFJ Looking at the member organizations listed as members of the IFJ, all are labor unions. The primary purpose of unions is to protect the union members from competition and poor working conditions. None of the IFJ members from the US have codes of ethics or conduct readily available for public inspection. Contrast that to engineering societies, they have their codes of ethics/conduct easily discoverable. Here at the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, Inc. (ABET) one can find a list of member engineering societies. Checking a few of them reveals that membership is only possible for Baccalaureate of Science: Engineering (B.S.E.) degree holders or students in B.S.E. programs. One will also discover that codes of conduct and ethics are readily available to the public. Here are some more journalist orgs but these have codes of ethics/conduct for members Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) has a code but membership is open to those being paid as journalists, those retired from being paid as journalists, those who agree with the goals of the SPJ, those who live with SPJ professional members, and under-/post graduate students. International Journalists' Network (IJNet) membership is through national organizations but they do have a very prominent link to access the Codes of Ethics of member organizations.

I doubt this 'blogger' is a member of any professional journalism organizations. I doubt they have any formal training, or indeed any training whatsoever. I'm curious as to how 'journalism' can be confused with some guy writing something and distributing it to the masses. If I print flyers and distribute them on the street corner, am I a journalist? No. If I tape posters to streetlamps and hydro poles, am I a journalist? No.

Yes, you are. Are you a paid journalist? No. Are you a professional journalist? No. Does being a "professional" journalist guarantee that you will have training, formal or otherwise? No. Unlike medicine, engineering, law, and architecture to name just a few professions, journalism has no licensing requirement and no standards for becoming a journalist other than to be paid to be a journalist.

Journalism is a profession that requires both skill and responsibility. To call bloggers 'journalists' is akin to calling an MCSE an 'engineer'. The word is far from the truth, and if being called a journalist requires nothing more than a voice, then the single most important career possible in an open and democratic society suddenly means nothing. When a loud voice and a sense of self-righteousness can be considered equal to understanding of ethics, unbiased reporting, and facility with the language, then 'journalism' is suddenly just a word, and all the respect it once deserved is lost forever.

Ideally, journalism is a profession that requires skill, responsibility, ethical behavior and impartiality. Journalists, however, have no licensing process. Engineers do. AFAICT, in order to qualify as a journalist, one need only be hired to perform such duties. There are no formal requirements of edu

We already have people to decide who is and is not a journalist - for example, the Canadian Association of Journalists, the International Federation of Journalists, and so on. This is how real journalists get press passes, by the way - they join the associations, which check their credentials, and issue passes.

The Canadian Assn. of Journalists (CAJ): the only requirement for membership is filling out a form and paying a fee. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) membership is through national organizations which are members of the IFJ Looking at the member organizations listed as members of the IFJ, all are labor unions. The primary purpose of unions is to protect the union members from competition and poor working conditions. None of the IFJ members from the US have codes of ethics or conduct readily available for public inspection. Contrast that to engineering societies, they have their codes of ethics/conduct easily discoverable. Here at the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, Inc. (ABET) one can find a list of member engineering societies. Checking a few of them reveals that membership is only possible for Baccalaureate of Science: Engineering (B.S.E.) degree holders or students in B.S.E. programs. One will also discover that codes of conduct and ethics are readily available to the public. Here are some more journalist orgs but these have codes of ethics/conduct for members Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) has a code but membership is open to those being paid as journalists, those retired from being paid as journalists, those who agree with the goals of the SPJ, those who live with SPJ professional members, and under-/post graduate students. International Journalists' Network (IJNet) membership is through national organizations but they do have a very prominent link to access the Codes of Ethics of member organizations.

I doubt this 'blogger' is a member of any professional journalism organizations. I doubt they have any formal training, or indeed any training whatsoever. I'm curious as to how 'journalism' can be confused with some guy writing something and distributing it to the masses. If I print flyers and distribute them on the street corner, am I a journalist? No. If I tape posters to streetlamps and hydro poles, am I a journalist? No.

Yes, you are. Are you a paid journalist? No. Are you a professional journalist? No. Does being a "professional" journalist guarantee that you will have training, formal or otherwise? No. Unlike medicine, engineering, law, and architecture to name just a few professions, journalism has no licensing requirement and no standards for becoming a journalist other than to be paid to be a journalist.

Journalism is a profession that requires both skill and responsibility. To call bloggers 'journalists' is akin to calling an MCSE an 'engineer'. The word is far from the truth, and if being called a journalist requires nothing more than a voice, then the single most important career possible in an open and democratic society suddenly means nothing. When a loud voice and a sense of self-righteousness can be considered equal to understanding of ethics, unbiased reporting, and facility with the language, then 'journalism' is suddenly just a word, and all the respect it once deserved is lost forever.

Ideally, journalism is a profession that requires skill, responsibility, ethical behavior and impartiality. Journalists, however, have no licensing process. Engineers do. AFAICT, in order to qualify as a journalist, one need only be hired to perform such duties. There are no formal requirements of edu

Your learning environment should make you push yourself a little. If you're able to go through your program doing homework only Monday through Thursday, spending the whole weekend smashed on recreational pharmaceuticals, and still maintaining a 4.0, your current program isn't pushing you enough. (This is not a random example.) A transfer might help with that, although other methods might be more economical. Most professors can find a ready (if unpaid) nitche in their research for a bright student looking for a chance to stretch themselves. Doing so provides a chance to challenge yourself, put some useful padding onto the resume, and possibly even get someone who would be delighted to give you a recommendation. If a miracle occurs, you might even get some money in the process, but don't hold your breath.

I've noticed that ABET has been reducing the amount of "knowledge" (e.g. math and science) and increasing the amount of "practice" required for an engineering degree for some time. ABET used to prescribe (fairly) rigid standards (e.g. math from mathematicians) and now lets universities (i.e. colleges of engineering) decide what makes up an engineering degree to a large extent. I think this is driven, in part, by engineering faculty (deans?) who want to use increased student credit hour production to justify additional money (but I am not certain about this).
The bottom line is that engineering (in the US) has been going downhill for 30 years. People in "industry" (aviation industry) have told me that in the 1960s and 70s a company could hire a new engineering graduate with a 2.0 (C) grade point average and have no problems with this employee while in the 1990s and now, a company could hire a new 4.0 (A) gpa engineering graduate and not necessarily get a knowledgable or skilled employee.

(I do not think ABET is that old and one cannot blame them for all the problems in engineering.)

For CS what really counts is CSAB accreditation (http://www.csab.org/ ), and Northface University doesn't have this.

CSAB is now part of ABET (i.e., the accreditation organization for CE and EE). The list of accredited schools is at:

http://www.abet.org/accredited_programs/computing/ schoolall.asp

I'm confused - you submit a post entitled "CS accreditations are worthless anyway", and then do not mention CS accreditations once. Oracle or Microsoft certification are not the same as being accredited by a body like ABET, etc.

Anyways, my point is, Be Careful; otherwise, you are just another lamer with a fake engineering degree.

And how have train-engine-operators been able to be called engineers?

They had it first, so we EE's cut them slack. If it helps you, think of it this way: they are "Engine-ers (injun-ers)", as in, "one who controls an engine". Not "Engineers (injun-eers)". BTW, you could be that too, if you could drive a train.

Computer Engineering is an offshoot of Electrical Engineering

I think you misspelled undershoot. Or perhaps failure.

Does this make me an engineer or not?

Not.

I've certainly taken all the course work and have a degree by that title from an accredited engineering program.

Er, accredited by whom? ABET doesn't accredit Comuter Science as "Engineering". Sorry.

There is a current trend of people calling themselves engineers when, in actuality, they are not, technically. Many projects which involve life and death consequences, such as power systems, bridges, etc. require a "real" engineer, one who has an engineering degree from an ABET accredited engineering program. Many times the project will even require a certified engineer, a Professional Engineer, PE. This is not unlike being licensed to be a doctor or lawyer. I can't just walk in off of the street and say that I'm a doctor and have the authority to practice medicine just because I've taken a few CPR classes, even though I may know as much as a licensed doctor. It's all about the credentials for liability purposes. The same should go for the engineering profession.

Not to sound elitist, but engineers are held to higher standards over run of the mill programmers for these reasons. Having said this, I'm a computer engineer and have a degree from an ABET accredited engineering program and I'd wager to say that there are MANY people who are much better programmers than I. I have no problem with computer science people or even self taught people being great programmers, what I do have a problem with is someone saying they are something which they are not.

Tau Beta Pi, the Engineering Honor Society, has struggled with this question as well. What disciplines should be considered "engineering?" At last year's convention, we approved (pending ratification due on Tuesday) following the guidelines set forth in ABET's criteria for Engineering programs. ABET (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) accredits four types of programs -- engineering, engineering technology, computer science, and applied math. 's move was to limit membership to those programs which fall in the domain of the first.

ABET recently added accreditation guidelines for Software Engineering, but as yet, no such programs have yet been accredited. (That is, their pop-up menu for "search by program" doesn't list Software Engineering.) ABET also accredits Computer Engineering, which is usually about hardware, though this includes some programs with "Computer Science" in their names (such as Berkeley's EECS program).

The requirements for Software Engineering are:
1. Curriculum
The curriculum must provide both breadth and depth across the range of engineering and computer science topics implied by the title and objectives of the program. The program must demonstrate that graduates have: the ability to analyze, design, verify, validate, implement, apply, and maintain software systems; the ability to appropriately apply discrete mathematics, probability and statistics, and relevant topics in computer science and supporting disciplines to complex software systems; and the ability to work in one or more significant application domains.
2. Faculty
The program shall demonstrate that those faculty teaching core software engineering material have practical software engineering experience.

This is the sense of "engineering" which is concerned with the profession of engineering -- who can legally say they're an engineer, which is what the Texas legislature is talking about. But the word "engineer" goes beyond accreditation and licensing. Are the only teachers in the world people who have a license to teach? Are you out of line by calling Hippocrates a physician and doctor because he didn't have an M.D.? Of course not.

The second sense of "engineer" is someone who integrates principles of math and science with real-world constraints in the design, creation, or maintenance of some in-context solution. Thus, studying the physical properties of electricity and building a circuit isn't engineering, it's science. But building such a circuit under performance, economic, and other constraints is engineering.

Algorithm development is thus mathematical engineering. When Edsgar Dijkstra first published a shortest path algorithm and provided a complexity bound (the first version was O(n^3) I've heard), mathematicians said "So what? Just list all possible paths and pick the shortest one." Which is, of course, impractical for any large system.

Software Engineers work with performance constraints, economic constraints, time constraints, constraints imposed by existing systems, security constraints, constraints of readability and maintainability, etc. The code you write for a homework assignment which is graded purely on its functional properties isn't (likely) an engineered program. But programs you download (especially large ones) have been engineered (or they suck).

Engineering doesn't have to be technical, though. City planners can be said to be Social Engineers. Some people claim the title of Financial Engineer. The folks at Kodak are Image Engineers. Gutenberg was one of the world's first Publishing Engineer.

"Engineering," like "guardian" has a legal definition and a common sense definition. Engineering, in English, is an approach and a mindset.

Tau Beta Pi, the Engineering Honor Society, has struggled with this question as well. What disciplines should be considered "engineering?" At last year's convention, we approved (pending ratification due on Tuesday) following the guidelines set forth in ABET's criteria for Engineering programs. ABET (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) accredits four types of programs -- engineering, engineering technology, computer science, and applied math. 's move was to limit membership to those programs which fall in the domain of the first.

ABET recently added accreditation guidelines for Software Engineering, but as yet, no such programs have yet been accredited. (That is, their pop-up menu for "search by program" doesn't list Software Engineering.) ABET also accredits Computer Engineering, which is usually about hardware, though this includes some programs with "Computer Science" in their names (such as Berkeley's EECS program).

The requirements for Software Engineering are:
1. Curriculum
The curriculum must provide both breadth and depth across the range of engineering and computer science topics implied by the title and objectives of the program. The program must demonstrate that graduates have: the ability to analyze, design, verify, validate, implement, apply, and maintain software systems; the ability to appropriately apply discrete mathematics, probability and statistics, and relevant topics in computer science and supporting disciplines to complex software systems; and the ability to work in one or more significant application domains.
2. Faculty
The program shall demonstrate that those faculty teaching core software engineering material have practical software engineering experience.

This is the sense of "engineering" which is concerned with the profession of engineering -- who can legally say they're an engineer, which is what the Texas legislature is talking about. But the word "engineer" goes beyond accreditation and licensing. Are the only teachers in the world people who have a license to teach? Are you out of line by calling Hippocrates a physician and doctor because he didn't have an M.D.? Of course not.

The second sense of "engineer" is someone who integrates principles of math and science with real-world constraints in the design, creation, or maintenance of some in-context solution. Thus, studying the physical properties of electricity and building a circuit isn't engineering, it's science. But building such a circuit under performance, economic, and other constraints is engineering.

Algorithm development is thus mathematical engineering. When Edsgar Dijkstra first published a shortest path algorithm and provided a complexity bound (the first version was O(n^3) I've heard), mathematicians said "So what? Just list all possible paths and pick the shortest one." Which is, of course, impractical for any large system.

Software Engineers work with performance constraints, economic constraints, time constraints, constraints imposed by existing systems, security constraints, constraints of readability and maintainability, etc. The code you write for a homework assignment which is graded purely on its functional properties isn't (likely) an engineered program. But programs you download (especially large ones) have been engineered (or they suck).

Engineering doesn't have to be technical, though. City planners can be said to be Social Engineers. Some people claim the title of Financial Engineer. The folks at Kodak are Image Engineers. Gutenberg was one of the world's first Publishing Engineer.

"Engineering," like "guardian" has a legal definition and a common sense definition. Engineering, in English, is an approach and a mindset.

The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology has been accrediting university engineering and computing programs for decades. The ACM already works with ABET.

Anyone who graduates from an ABET-accredited program may say so. However, graduation from such a program doesn't necessarily say a great deal about an individual's capabilities.

I have a degree in Computer Systems Engineering from Arizona State University. I like to think that I am an engineer. I feel that the work I do is above just coding but at the same time I work with people with "Software Engineering" from a "design" school. They are the ones who seem happy to call themselves software engineers. I went to school and suffered through statics, physics, and calculus like the electrical, chemical, and civil engineers around me. My college had ABET accreditation so again I like to think that I am a real engineer. I know I may be viewed as a code monkey but I have a job so call me what you will.

I agree with you. I think undergraduate degrees in software engineering should be more readily available (and accredited by ABET). Sort of like the difference between chemistry and chemical engineering. Degrees in IS/MIS are available, but those are really focused on becoming a systems analyst or a corporate IT programmer, and not very heavy on actual programming or design.

I'm just a student, so I'm not the most knowledgeable person in this arena. I also do not officially represent the school in any comment here.

We are most likely going to go far above and beyond the requirements for nonengineering courses by design. It's how we're trying to set ourselves apart.

The primary reason we are not accredited is that an old ABET regulation says that a school must graduate a class first. I don't care that we're not, because we've been working with the board to achieve and surpass any requirements. Also, some companies have promised to hire any graduates on the spot, along with a lot of graduate schools showing interest. So accreditation doesn't have to be the be-all-end-all solution.

They're not assuming that they know Linux, they're assuming that they know Unix; CS acredidation programs don't give a shit wether its Linux, Solaris, BSD. Most schools do this using SunOS/Solaris. All schools with accreditation from a decent authority require atleast some Unix programmming for CS degrees.

See Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology for information on one of the most widely accepted CS accreditations.

First the little piece of paper .. well when heads come to role .. those that do not have that piece of paper are generally the first out the door.

I have seen many people get passed up for promotion because they dont have that piece of paper.

I have worked with 18 month and "here is your BS in CS" people ... they are "ok" when it comes to programming Visual Basic. BS in CS to the max.

Fast track degrees are NOT accredited by the Computer Science Accreditation Board (CSAB). (now abet)

And one final thing, when you take a "quickie" course .. they tell you what you should think. A good 4 year college will teach how to think for yourself.

Getting a "quickie" CS degree is like going out and buying a Yugo, it can get your around, but you just dont know how reliable it is.

Take your time and get the 4 year degree. There is no shame for taking time. In fact with benefits from work, taxes, etc, it may be better in the long run. If you want take ALL your CS courses first, and then grind out the humanities, science and math courses.
Dont be cheap on yourself.

However, that is completely wrong.

You see, if a university wants to give someone a degree with the word "Engineering" on it, the program has to be accredited by ABET. The accreditation makes sure that students are learning enough programming and, yes, that they know at least something about circuits, computer architectures, and signals and systems (about one class each is enough). Therefore, only departments that have been accredited by ABET can give "computer engineering" degrees.

If a University wants to give "Computer science" degrees then it can get accredited by CSAB. Their accreditation requirements are more "lenient" than ABET's since they require fewer "hardware" courses (if any).

Usually, the only difference is that a computer engineer has to take about three more classes (circuits, computer architecture, signals and systems) than a computer scientist in order to fulfill the degree requirements, but it depends on the school.

Note also that CSAB and ABET are integrating their CS and CE accreditation so in the future there probably will not be any difference.

The U. Michigan has a good FAQ on the subject.

I know this because almost every singly student I advise asks me about it.

When looking for graduates, you need to find how their program is classified. The American Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology classifies various programs of various disciplines:

• Engineering Programs
• Technology Programs
• Engineering-Related Programs

Again, if you are looking for traditional engineering types, you want the first. If you are looking for formally trained technicians, then you want the later. Beyond that, you do not need formally educated personnel IMHO. Either that or the personnel you are looking for are part of the math/science disciplines (like CS).

-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith