Slashdot Mirror
Professor Questions Sink-Or-Swim Intro To CS Courses
theodp writes "After having taught introductory programming (CS 1) for the past six years,' writes GVSU's Zack Kurmas, 'and having watched many students struggle through this course and the subsequent course (CS 2), I have come to the conclusion that it is absurd to expect students who don't have any prior programming experience to be well prepared to study Computer Science after a single 15-week course (i.e., CS 1). I believe that expecting a student to learn to program well enough to study Computer Science in a single 15-week course is almost as absurd as expecting a student with no instrumental musical experience to be ready to join the university orchestra after 15 weeks.' Kurmas' frustrations are not unlike those voiced by Physics professor Dr. Yung Tae Kim, who argues the up-or-out, one-size-fits-all rigid pace approach to learning set by teachers and administrators is as absurd as telling a toddler, 'You have ten weeks to walk, and if you can't, you get an F and you're not allowed to try to walk anymore."
If you didnt already begin in a high school class, or at the very least on hobby projects?
OK, so because we've always done it that way, it must be a reasonable way. Nice appeal to tradition. Perhaps we should admit that it's unreasonable to expect that students taking an intro course to have experience. Call me naive, but I always assumed that introductory courses were intended for those without experience to gain some before getting into the more difficult coursework.
We had a particular course module at uni, which after 3 weeks expected us to be experts enough in C (and in *NIX type systems) such that we could properly start the actual course which was about Systems Programming in *NIX.
I think it's expected especially in this vocational line that you have to pick up the pace and learn stuff quickly enough. If you're starting a new job and they use a technology which you never heard of - you need to pick it up.
So I disagree. The faster they get to the idea that you're going to be thrown into the deep end - the better they'll be in the end.
The problem isn't the program, the problem is the students. Essentially, they come to University ill prepared and pay the price (i.e. high-schools are no longer doing their job).
However, when it comes to CS, there is a specific issue that must be brought up. Namely, that students think that Computer Science equals computer programming. Anyone that has studied both can say that they aren't even remotely the same. So, it's no wonder the students fail. They think they'll be learning to be programmers, and then get nailed with an Applied Math.
The solution here isn't to change the curriculum. But, rather to inform students what they will learn at a University (Academia) v.s. Applied Colleges (they're called Colleges in Canada, not sure what they are called in the US) v.s. trade schools, etc. Then send them in their desired direction.
In other words, University professors, stop becoming part of the education problem, think and become part of the solution.
Programming is easy for people who will be good at programming. It requires being able to take a solution to a problem and arrange it into a set of instructions. If you can't do that by the time you get to college, and especially if you can't do that after 15 weeks of intro, you're not going to learn it in college, because the problem isn't that the student doesn't have CS experience; the problem is the student doesn't know how to solve problems and write down the solution.
That's not something that a HS grad who doesn't know it already is going to learn.
paintball
If you didnt already begin in a high school class, or at the very least on hobby projects?
I think this is the wrong way to approach a defense of these practices. Computer Science (CS) gets made fun of a lot ... or at least it did when I was in it. "What's the matter, couldn't you handle an actual engineering major like Computer Engineering or Electrical Engineering?" And, you know, those course paths are tighter in the electives area (I should mention I went to school at the U of MN in case it's different elsewhere). Anyway, CS has many dimensions to it. The foundation is mathematics, statistics, algorithms and logic to name a few without getting into theory like automata. After all that, you have what I'll call the "cosmetics" (for lack of a better word) which are what the flavor of the year is for most popular language. Now it's either Java or Ruby but when I was in undergrad, it was C++ and Java. And there was PHP for web, MySQL for Databases, etc. And I think the reason we need to keep the weed-out course structure is that it was fun for me to learn Ruby on Rails on my own. It was an adventure I enjoyed (albeit a ridiculously easy adventure). And if you're going to be in CS, you need to have the attitude that the cosmetic stuff either comes naturally to you or is something you do in your free time. When I took my Java course, I had already worked through java.sun.com's tutorial "pathways" online and knew what all the keywords were in the language and why we use them ahead of the course. To learn recursion with this background was fairly trivial. Honestly, I don't remember learning much else in that course. And I think that's why it's important to keep that minor level of entry. Because people who have a passion don't want to have to go through course after course of learning a language or basic programming so that they can get to the good stuff.
... and I have no clue if that developer learned C in college and thinks they'll never need to know another language. A lot of my free time is spent experimenting with new languages that I'll often never use professionally and I think it makes me a better programmer. To try to identify an unwillingness to do this in 15 weeks might be saving a lot of people a lot of time and money. And maybe even protecting them from unemployment later in life.
And those languages are a dime a dozen and they could change at the drop of a hat. As time goes on, there's only more implementations to choose from. When I went through college, functional languages were almost dead. And now Ruby is more functional than object oriented and I use it daily. So I'm glad I got to the theory instead of ever being forced to take a course on how to code PHP or how to set up JDBC connectors. But in my later courses, they demanded that implicitly in order to fulfill understanding the functionality of a transactional RDBMS.
I think it's actually a very kind thing to say after 15 weeks: "Hey, if you don't play around with this stuff in your free time, what are you going to do when we teach you Java and five years later you need to sink-or-swim learn Ruby?" Because that's exactly what happened to me and sometimes I come across much older developers that say "Pshaw, Ruby, who the hell would want to code that? I can write the same thing in C and it's fifty times faster." And they're right but they fail to see that my manager doesn't care about speed, they care about maintainability (it's often running on top of a VM anyway)
When you're a CS major, your learning should never stop or you will be quickly unemployed. That might be true with other majors but I've heard people brag they haven't picked up a book since college. Did I find it wrong or unfair for my university to engage in these practices? Maybe when I was in college or maybe if I had only ever been in academia but now it doesn't seem so harsh.
When people tell me they want to code as a hobby I usually say: "T
My work here is dung.
But, not everyone can be brilliant. Isn't one of the purposes of education to teach people, even so-so ones, a job ? To paraphrase my friend cap. Obvious, not all programmers can be above average.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
This is not about "No student left behind". This is not about "People must be able to get the degree". This is about setting a standard and if you get that standard, you pass and if not, you fail.
Sure it is almost impossible for people without the proper knowledge to pass. That is the whole point of it all. To see who is ready and who is not. Some will pass and some will fail.
People who are better prepared will have it a lot easier then those who are not. News at 11.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Universities are there to preserve and advance the knowledge of humanity.
Cramming 150 kids into a lecture hall with a "mathematician" who wasn't smart enough for the math department, who has never written software for a living and doesn't natively speak the language of most of his student body, and who disappears at the end of the class, shoving his students towards some grad students when they have questions... Where the "teaching" involves reading pages from a badly written $300 book, and then having exactly two interactions with the class: "Midterm" and "Final..." And where in many schools the dirty little secret is that the curve takes the average "D" or "F" up to a "C..."
Aside from a few top schools (who do their best filtering with the SAT, or heaven forbid, other parts of the application), this is the reality of undergrad CS (and these in particular are all true stories). I don't see why you'd waste time on the finer points.
The entire academy in the U.S. is collapsing. Yes, the pipelines for the few moneymaking careers left in society are still somewhat functional (finance, law... medicine, somewhat), but in many other places, the tornado of American societal collapse has passed through. More and more of the marginal schools and departments have essentially opted to become high-gloss degree mills rather than go gently into that good night. The scam is the educational equivalent of shitting where you sleep - only one generation of undergrads is going to get themselves bilked for $200k of student debt for the experience described above, let alone when most of their degrees "prepare" them for a future career lacking any hope of paying it back.
Computer science is still a white collar job in the West for a little longer, but it lacks a professional trade group giving licenses and setting educational benchmarks. And that leads us to the punch line. The C.S. degree isn't even needed for finding work. Anyone with good code to show from their own efforts, especially success in the open source world, will get a job today, and with a few resume lines no one is looking further down. And that, by the way, is because (aside from those top schools, and often even then), they know a degree is worthless as a predictor of quality.
I guess you can ignore all this and still decide philosophically whether you think CompSci is like medicine or even like plumbing, where there is some effort to make it difficult and filter out the riff-raff... or it'll stay just another joke degree.
Tired of Political Trolls? Opt Out!
You can train nearly everything, but training does not make you good.
Errr... yes it does. Or were you always a good driver / writer / programmer? Training is exactly the process of making someone good at something!
Don't make IT/CS easier. Make it harder, please.
Ah, the predictable "pull the ladder up after you've climbed".
That is moronic. You deserve an F for not learning what the course aims to teach you in advance of taking the course? FUCK THAT. Why take the course then?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
How is CS, true CS, any less of a science than Biology, Chemistry, Anthropology, or any other "ogy" you want to throw out there? Yes, there are many who end up working in the private sector, working for financial services firms developing apps, but how is that any different from the chemist working on drug manufacturing?
Much ground-breaking research has come out of the CS community. What IS science by your definition? Do not be so dismissive of the "science" in CS.
Opinion:=TMyOpinion.Create(Me);