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?
I can speak only for Germany but during my studies I noticed quite a number of students which had no background (beside having played computer games all day in earlier days), had absolutely no talent (everyone can learn how to program, but most people won't become good at it), no clue and struggled a lot. Yet most of them made it through the finals, have now a B.Sc. and compete with people who really know the shit on the job market, negatively influencing hourly rates and reputation of IT. In my professional life so far I had to work with many many idiots who nethertheless had a degree.
So I believe I disagree with this professor. Yes, not everyone might be willing to achieve the results in that time frame. But I honestly believe that most people who don't deserve to be there in the first place. Either you have what it takes or you don't. As said: You can train nearly everything, but training does not make you good. Programming is very often a task which included creativity (figuring out how to solve a problem in the best way) and if you don't have that ability, you will produce bad results. It's as simple as that.
Don't make IT/CS easier. Make it harder, please.
What next, CS students get slack for not knowing how to read and write, addition and multiplication, and all the other skills you're expected to have when entering a high-level field of study?
Computer science isn't a vocation education... You're there to learn the theory and techniques of programming, amongst other things. If you haven't taught yourself the basics of programming by the time you enroll then you deserve that F.
- These characters were randomly selected.
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.
I went to MIT in the early 80's, when interest in CS was exploding and the CS department was heavily oversubscribed. The introductory class taught LISP and Algol and was used to weed the applicants for a CS major down to something the department might have some hope of coping with. Additionally, if you switched majors, this was the only department that didn't allow you to switch back.
Towards the end of my stay there other departments started operating their own basic CS class so that one could learn the rudiments needed to function in other engineering disciplines without having to devote one's life to CS arcana. This helped to take the pressure off the CS school.
I'm not sure that I really agree with the Professor's foundational analogy between studying programming and playing orchestral music. I'll explain why.
The students who played in the university orchestra back when I was at university were phenomenally good. Many of them played professionally or intended to. That is where the analogy with computer programming becomes strained. There is no room, in professional music, for someone who is not very good, or just learning, or who lacks experience. The musicians who play in orchestras at anything approaching a high level have a degree of musical ability that I find absolutely astounding; the difference between a very good hobbyist musician and a professional or semi-professional is like night and day. That ability is normally the result of spending 30 hours or more a week, every week, practising or learning under the tuition of an excellent player for 15 or more years. And the competition is such that that is effectively the minimum level of ability required to play in a good orchestra. Many of the musicians will be far better and far more experienced than that.
In contrast, programming is a career in which a person can grow on-the-job not only from "excellent" to "phenomenal" but from "not particularly good, but promising", to "good", and then on to "excellent" and "phenomenal" after another 10 or 20 years. There are plenty of roles for people who can code slowly but proficiently, especially if they have the potential to get better. Comparing those students to others in a far more competitive area just is not helpful - one could equally compare computer science students with lawyers being sponsored through college by White-Shoe firms. Of course the computer scientists will, on average, be less developed, less well-rounded, even less competent. But it's not a useful comparison.
I don't know what approach the Professor's university takes but I did not, when I was studying, encounter a sink-or-swim approach to computer science coding. That approach, it seems to me, crops up when the expectation is that computer scientists, on completing the course, will have a level of competence beyond what is reasonable - an expectation that is encouraged by making unreasonable comparisons. On the other hand there were, as the Professor notes, a good number of people dropping out or changing course. I would ascribe that, rather than to a course that makes unreasonable demands, to a factor that he notes - computer science is not taught at schools. It is one of a number of courses that students choose without really knowing what it will involve. I suspect that in all those subjects there is a high initial drop-out rate as students realise that the course is not what they had expected, or is not for them, or simply that a particular aspect is more interesting and that they would prefer to specialise in, for example, mathematics.
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.
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.
Thisthisthisthis!
I tutored programming when I was an undergrad. They call those "weed out courses" for a reason. Some folks are just not capable of CS. I had to tutor one kid who could not understand arguments and function calls. I spent over an hour trying to explain it to him with five different analogies and sketches on a chalk board and lots of emphatic hand-gestures, and yet he had absolutely no clue how to read
int multiply(int x, int y)
{
return x * y;
}
Some people just don't cut it, even as code monkeys. And universities shouldn't be flooding the job market by giving idiots a degree.
:(){
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!
"But that punishes those students who didn't have the resources to practice music on their own! Instruments are expensive! THIS IS CLASS WARFARE!"
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
I'd say that was perfectly put. I can add nothing.
Tired of Political Trolls? Opt Out!
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
Having been a music major, a film/television major, and someone who hangs around with computer-oriented people most of his life, I think a better comparison would be film and television students. Some of them come into programs with experience in photography and video, some have even done some work that has been on the air, but most have never been near a video camera and can barely press record. The first television production course I took had 50 kids. It was all about hardware and a lot of people were totally lost. It was designed to weed out. The next had 20, and the last had 15. Since I had been taking stills for years, I had a basic understanding of exposure and composition. I also had a fairly strong background in electronics so that helped too. But there were other kids who had no background in either who were able to tough it out and get through it, one I remember was an excellent videographer even though he'd never done it before. Some of us would hang out in the studio and work on each other's projects. Some would attend class and disappear. But I'd say we all were competent enough to get an internship when we graduated (or some other entry level job).
Music, on the other hand, is much more about honing your skills. The system just isn't at all about teaching the basics of your instrument. You have to audition to even be accepted. But there's already an infrastructure in place to accommodate that. I'd been playing since the 4th grade, all though high school I'd been in various bands, orchestras, chorus and choirs, and small ensembles. I'd also been in private lessons all through high school. How many comp-sci majors can say they have similar training?
I'm sure this professor would like to see more students like Linus Torvalds and WOZ (who designed computers over summer vacation), but it isn't going to happen. I'm sure the instructors in the film department would like to see more Steven Spielbergs too (he had been making films since he was 10 before attending USC). The fact is, the field isn't set up that way.
I'm really fascinated by what has happened to video in the past 5 years or so. Now that high quality cameras are cheap, desktop video editors are free, and anyone can publish short pieces easily, we should see a general improvement in the craft. It is going to take time, after all the first round of high school filmmakers is just now entering film school, but I would think we will see some amazing stuff on the horizon. The only thing that I see missing is the one-on-one instruction at the high school level.
The same thing could be happening in comp-sci. If you subscribe to the idea that it take 10,000 hours (sort of the point of this post), the highschoolers today need to have programing tutors. There are a few, but not nearly enough to get kids beyond the "hey that's cool, I'd like to try that" through the tough stuff where most will give up.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
We hear all the time that "any trade school code monkey could write that software" or "my nephew could program that" or "it's a small matter of programming". Yet here we have a prime example that it's not that easy, is it? I think people (both individually and in aggregate) *still* don't really understand software. It's understandable, because it really is different. Name another product where the design /is/ the product.
As for "dumbing down" courses, or not expecting people to learn to program in X weeks, maybe we should just admit that most people cannot learn to program, no matter how long you take trying to teach them. Maybe sometimes some children *should* be left behind, or better yet, directed to things they can actually learn to do.
Nathan's blog
I'd be willing to bet they are channeled into college by their parents and advisers so they can have a 'better life'. The myth is still out there that IT is a high paying white collar job. In some cases that is true, you get professional pay and professional respect. In a lot of cases though, you are a salary exempt pager slave. Those patches aren't going to install themself, son.
Ironically, good plumbers can earn $70k, go into business for themselves with a few $k in tools and a pickup truck. All of which they can purchase with the money they'll save going to a VoTech school instead of college. They may have to spend as much time learning their craft, but most of it will be working under a master craftsman. Earn while you learn. And no fear of being outsourced.
Another day, another update to a Google android app.
I don't know what analogies you used and what your tutoring abilities are, but I knew a number of people, who excessively used analogies in every day lives, always trying to describe the most mundane things with these analogies, which most of the time were terrible, and by using analogies they made things worse, not better.
--
Anyway, if somebody asked me to explain that piece of code (a function takes in 2 parameters, returns a value equal to the multiple of the two, has no effect on scope of global variables, has no side effects on the values of the parameters to the function), I would not use any analogies beyond this: a = 1 * 2, and everything else has to be explained precisely, without any analogies.
The concepts are many: there is the 'int', so data structure must be explained, there is the '*', so the operator must be explained, there are the '{' and '}', so the scope must be explained, there is the 'return', so this has to be explained (it's equivalent to the '=' in math.)
int - an integer between lower and upper bound
* - a multiplication operator, this should be understood from math and use of calculators (if nothing else)
{} - are scope, which is equivalent to () in math
return - equivalent of '=' in math.
--
If the student was struggling with different notations, that's one thing, if he was struggling with understanding of math, that's another problem altogether.
You can't handle the truth.
I just took a list at Craigslist, and a number of adds said "BSCS required" and the like, go look yourself. What does that mean? It means when if things get shaky at your company and the economy gets shaky and you're applying for jobs, that's a job you can't apply for. Well you can apply, but they've said up front they don't want you.
You're right that there are bad schools and bad professors and bad textbooks - so go to a good school. Find out which professors are good via ratemyprofessors, internal school rankings and the grapevine.
I also think there is an inherent worth to four (or more) years study of computer science that four years of reading books on C++ is not going to get you. You lay the foundation with a study of discrete and continuous mathematics, then you study computation and complexity, as well as other topics. By the time you get to practical applications, you have a full, rich understanding of everything going on, are familiar with algorithms, data structures, machines etc. in a more complete way and so forth. You can do this study independently, but why not go to a good local public school - some of your professors will know a lot, and working with other students is helpful and you'll get a degree out of it to boot.
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);
> Training is exactly the process of making someone good at something!
Well, this is a typical manager attitude - this does not make it any more true, though: Training is the process of systematically (as opposed to implicitly as e.g. by learning on the job) turning talent into skill.
If the talent is there, then training will indeed make you good or better at something. If it lacks, no amount of training will make you "good" in any reasonable sense; basically, you will be reduced to "faking it" with huge effort but very little to show for it. In some rare cases, this is worth it (mobility training for the blind comes to mind), most of the time it is not.
In IT/CS it is even worse, as without enough talent, in a professional environment, you will often end up with not just low but negative productivity i.e. causing more problems than you actually solve (and often make your life miserable in the process).