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."

Comments

WHy are you majoring in CS...

[LordLimecat]

If you didnt already begin in a high school class, or at the very least on hobby projects?

Re:WHy are you majoring in CS...

[Anonymous Coward]

I know! Would you trust a doctor who, at the age of 15, wasn't operating on his pets?

Re:WHy are you majoring in CS...

[TheRaven64]

Would you trust a doctor who went to university never having taken biology at school? Well, maybe, if he managed to graduate, but I wouldn't expect him to pass. Pretty much any medical degree in the UK will require A-level biology (no idea what the US equivalent is). Unfortunately, most computer science courses have very few fixed prerequisites. A lot don't even require maths, because A-level maths is mostly calculus, which is irrelevant to 90% of computer science, and completely omit things like graph theory that are absolutely fundamental.

This is a real problem when trying to design a curriculum. You can't expect the students to have been taught programming, because most schools don't have anyone who's competent to teach it. Some will have taught themselves stuff (and probably picked up some bad habits along the way), some will not. The ones who are self taught will be bored for at least some of the first year, since everyone else will be catching up. Worse, they often assume that the fact that they already know some of the material means that they already know all of it, and get a nasty shock at exam time.

The real solution is for schools to employ people who are competent to teach programming, and for universities to make this a prerequisite, but I doubt that will happen.

Re:WHy are you majoring in CS...

[SomeKDEUser]

CS is not programming, CS is a field of math, so taking all the courses in math is wayyy more relevant than anything else.

Programming itself is just syntax, logic, and a good sense of structure and style. Which you can acquire in any engineering design course: there is more resemblance between a well-designed engine or structure and a programme than you'd believe.

Also, if you are doing CS with the goal of becoming a code monkey/senior designer/something in between you must understand that the knowledge around the code, the engineering, science, accounting, etc. is what will allow you to code the things which do what they are supposed to. The requirements will not be in terms of programme structure, but in terms of require functionality in the relevant domain.

Is IT/CS/... not easy enough already?

[kju]

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.

Re:Is IT/CS/... not easy enough already?

[martin-boundary]

If people want a job, they should go to trade school. What is it with this idea that universities are job placement firms?

Universities are there to preserve and advance the knowledge of humanity.

It's not the Curriculum!!!

[Secret Rabbit]

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.

Forget the trees, the forest is burning.

[Concern]

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.

Re:Forget the trees, the forest is burning.

[wonkavader]

"The C.S. degree isn't even needed for finding work." You are partly correct.

What you should have said was "A C.S. degree, unless it's from a fairly well regarded program, has nothing to do with you getting hired for a programming job." Any good shop will make you code as part of the interview, and most people from lower-end schools CS programs come out not being able to code at all.

I would say that it in fact hurts you in your attempt to get a job, but not because people see it and are repelled. The problem is that CS is a job degree. It's not science. It's like going to a technical school and studying wielding or diesel truck repair. It implies that
    a. you were worried about getting a job after college, which implies a lack of self confidence in the first place, which is an indicator (though not a perfect indicator) that you were substandard in the first place.
    b. you spent 4 years in a college or university, where you should have been learning to think and write and popping around subjects learning about the world, and instead you spent the bulk of your classes learning about something which comes easily to people who do well in the field. That wasn't very clever, and points back to item a, and means that in the interview, you're not a very interesting person.

CS is a white-collar job, and so it's important that the people who do it go to college. Instead, CS grad from lower-tier schools come out with "a college degree" which is only really a third of a college degree.

You're right that the forest is burning. The problem is that we're trying to turn colleges into vocational schools. They're not. They're supposed to tech you to be a Renaissance man, or at least to be smart and to think and write and know about a lot of things in the world. Vocational schools are different. Primary education is a vocational school. The fact that we're destroying our colleges and universities is directly related to the collapse of our primary education: we're expecting higher ed to pick up the slack, which means that it can't do what it's supposed to do.

Re:Forget the trees, the forest is burning.

[Concern]

Ah, the H1-B. Purpose-designed to destroy the US skilled labor market, by ending the centuries-old "give me your skilled, your intelligent, your yearning to be economically productive" liberal immigration policies that made this nation great, and replacing them with a regime that allows smart foreigners to come to the US for education and a few years of on the job experience, then forces many who would gladly stay in the West to return to their currency-debased homelands, where they compete more effectively for the same work, at pennies on the dollar.

You can thank the brass at IBM, Oracle, CA and a few other leading tech companies for this ingenious economic ass fucking. We used to brain drain the world. Now it's yet another group of American senior managers shitting where they sleep, since the only thing that makes the U.S. any different from a chillier northern region of Mexico is the economic and social policies they're happy to undermine for a decade or two of quick bucks.

Re:Forget the trees, the forest is burning.

[DavidTC]

Indeed. It's exactly the same trick with using powerless illegal immigrants, except the H1-B visa is legal.

I'm nearing the opinion that we should create a constitutional amendment that says anyone under the jurisdiction of the US for more than six month becomes an American citizen. Period.

Because the entire scam is to keep those people powerless. White collar, blue collar, migrant workers, it doesn't matter, it's all the exact fucking scam to one end:

Keep the workers powerless. At least, keep them powerless in America.

If they need to physically be here, make sure they're here illegally, or make sure that their employer can send them home at a whim. If they don't been to physically be here, well, don't have them here, or just have them here for their education and then send them home.

And this, of course, doesn't just fuck over those people, it fucks over citizens, who have hypothetical 'political power', but no actual money.

Re:Reading, counting to 100 and other difficult ta

[syousef]

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?