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Google Suggests Separating Students With 'Some CS Knowledge' From Novices
theodp writes To address the challenge of rapidly increasing CS enrollments and increasing diversity, reports the Computing Education Blog, Google in November put out an RFP to universities for its invite-only 3X in 3 Years: CS Capacity Award program, which aims "to support faculty in finding innovative ways to address the capacity problem in their CS courses." In the linked-to RFP document, Google suggests that "students that have some CS background" should not be allowed to attend in-person intro CS courses where they "may be more likely to create a non-welcoming environment," and recommends that they instead be relegated to online courses. According to a recent NSF press release, this recommendation would largely exclude Asian and White boys from classrooms, which seems to be consistent with a Google-CodeCademy award program that offers $1,000 bonuses to teachers who get 10 or more high school kids to take a JavaScript course, but only counts students from "groups traditionally underrepresented in computer science (girls, or boys who identify as African American, Latino, American Indian or Alaska Native)." The project suggested in the Google RFP — which could be worth $1.5 million over 3 years to a large CS department — seems to embrace-and-extend a practice implemented at Harvey Mudd College years ago under President Maria Klawe, which divided the intro CS offering into separate sections based upon prior programming experience to — as the NY Times put it — reduce the intimidation factor of young men, already seasoned programmers, who dominated the class. Google Director of Education and University Relations Maggie Johnson, whose name appears on the CS Capacity RFP, is also on the Board of Code.org (where Klawe is coincidentally an Advisory Board member), the K-12 learn-to-code nonprofit that has received $3+ million from Google and many millions more from other tech giants and their execs. Earlier this week, Code.org received the blessing of the White House and NSF to train 25,000 teachers to teach CS, stirring unease among some educators concerned about the growing influence of corporations in public schools.
"groups traditionally underrepresented in computer science (girls, or boys who identify as African American, Latino, American Indian or Alaska Native)"
I'm confused. They list out African American and Alaska Native (the latter being a term I'd never heard before, but I assume is the PC term for Eskimo), but then they also list American Indian? I thought it was totally un-PC to call them Indians, and that the Politically Correct term was "Native American"?
Only certain people got to go to their camps.
Doesn't matter what background you come from; if your family was dirt poor, if you had to work all through HS just to keep food on the table. If you grew up in a third world country. Your different experience and perspective doesn't mean anything because you are a white male.
Orrr, how about this, we ask if people are able to access online services easily, if they have decent financials, and if they do, say they can do it online and through meet-up groups.
Or, you know, build more shit and make more of the course self-learn through regular non-compulsory meet-ups. (with the ability to ask one of the lecturers about problems they have)
This way, people that actually tend to work well in teams and want to strive for it will get somewhere.
Then the people that come from a more disadvantaged background will get more constant help through a traditional lecture.
This is a very simple rough idea, could be expanded easily, but that is all I have time to type for now. Goodbye.
I'm all for keeping experienced CS students out of intro classes! I was forced to take one of those idiotic intro courses in college, even though I already knew the material! Attendance was mandatory, and no test out option allowed. Complete waste of my time, and it certainly ruined the curve for the true intro level students. I suspect other readers had similar experiences.
If you haven't noticed, Google sucks now. They're not organized, lean and driven by good engineers anymore. Those engineers are suffocated by a bunch of incompetent middle managers, at least one manager per engineer sometimes more. Their interfaces are designed specifically for mentally retarded children only by algorithms and robots, not humans. All their products are becoming more and more bug ridden, less stable and all the nice UI features of the past are getting shitcanned. Their Google+ idea was stupid, creepy, and cultish. They don't exist anymore to serve the user, they exist only to keep on existing. They're a blob now, like Microsoft turning out failure after failure and then needing to eventually lay off a number as massive as 18,000 employees. Google is not at the mass layoff stage but they're making progress. For Google, All their old school products have been disfigured and crippled or gassed entirely. They're a giant of disappointing blob of suffocated engineering talent and too many fucking managers. And now like zuckberg they need to harvest new CS grads like soylent greens to feed the blob.
... the way to address the diversity issue is to dumb everybody down? Sure, that sounds like it would provide a level playing field, but the goddam field would be below sea level.
Back to the drawing board.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
You read it as "Harry Mudd College"
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
reduce the intimidation factor of young men, already seasoned programmers, who dominated the class.
Why not assign each of these to pair up with someone who isn't as far along, instead of saying "you can't go here"?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Sounds great to me. People who already know the course content don't waste their time sitting through slow-mo stuff they already know. People who don't get to learn it without having to feel like they are stupid, or more importantly, having time that could be used teaching them used to deal with people ahead of the grade.
This is already done in language classes and other university courses where students come into a program with different levels of competence. I don't know why the summary pushes so hard on the white male aspect. I know my young, white male self would have much preferred to challenge courses with an exam, and/or get an online learn-at-my-own pace version.
It's called CIS
How about you just let these "seasoned programmers" test out of the introduction classes and jump directly into the non-intro classes? Can't have that, though, as that would promote inequality further by giving them a chance to take sophomore level classes as freshman. Oh the humanity...
It's not new and called 'positive discrimination'.
Apart that you are totally right, it remains discrimination.
There is no war on men. I repeat, there is no war on men. Move along, citizen.
To address the challenge of rapidly increasing CS enrollments and increasing diversity, reports the Computing Education Blog, Google in November put out an RFP to universities for its invite-only 3X in 3 Years: CS Capacity Award program, which aims "to support faculty in finding innovative ways to address the capacity problem in their CS courses." In the linked-to RFP document, Google suggests that "students that have some CS background" should not be allowed to attend in-person intro CS courses where they "may be more likely to create a non-welcoming environment," and recommends that they instead be relegated to online courses. According to a recent NSF press release, this recommendation would largely exclude Asian and White boys from classrooms
In other words, they're trying to remove White males and Asians for non-merit reasons, and making it look like it was a merit-based criteria.
The project suggested in the Google RFP — which could be worth $1.5 million over 3 years to a large CS department — seems to embrace-and-extend a practice implemented at Harvey Mudd College years ago under President Maria Klawe, which divided the intro CS offering into separate sections based upon prior programming experience to — as the NY Times put it — reduce the intimidation factor of young men, already seasoned programmers, who dominated the class.
Intimidation? That sounds like they're not interested in merit but in discrimination against Asians and White males - as in wanting to see them leave CS. As one of those "white males that dominated the class" through performance, I used that knowledge to legitimately help others (which might be an extraordinary concept at Harvey Mudd).
The only thing they want to do is to embrace and extend a false sense of diversity while extinguishing the supply of education to those not "diverse" enough.
Google Director of Education and University Relations Maggie Johnson, whose name appears on the CS Capacity RFP, is also on the Board of Code.org (where Klawe is coincidentally an Advisory Board member), the K-12 learn-to-code nonprofit that has received $3+ million from Google and many millions more from other tech giants and their execs. Earlier this week, Code.org received the blessing of the White House and NSF to train 25,000 teachers to teach CS, stirring unease among some educators concerned about the growing influence of corporations in public schools.
As long as you're a Diversity Candidate, they want you to learn. If you're a White male or Asian, they want you not to learn. That, and combined with the preference for non-US labor, they don't want White males or Asians in traditional lines of work either.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Google Suggests Separating Students With 'Some Knowledge' From Novices
This was played out already, albeit in a different scenario.
Over 25 years ago I was admitted into the SUNY Binghamton (NY) CS masters degree program. I had no CS training at all and did not qualify. However, their affirmative action program included something like extra entry points for veterans so I got in. I was required to take tough summer long CS course, along with many African American and female students. It brought us up to speed enough to compete next semester with those who were already knowledgeable . Otherwise we would not have made it.
Affirmative Action students spent their own money and their own time. The reward for America was a raising of the skills level for a lot more people, white (me) as well as black. I don't know if AA like this is still legal, but what Google is suggesting - the effective sequestering of unprepared individuals until they are ready - is a good idea.
PS: I finished 11th of an original 100 on the MS overall final
Having a CS degree and having 10+ years of professional experience in industry, it is clear that a significant amount of those taking CS (or related IT/programming-oriented programs) don't really have the qualifications for a CS-career, and even after years of employment are still struggling with rather basic programming tasks and are having problems handling just a few levels of abstraction, which is routinely required in any serious programming. Some of the skills required seem to be an "either you have it, or you don't thing" at least after a few years into a career. The saving grace for them is the good job market (for employees) and the ability to go into more management or PM-oriented roles, or at least very soft CS-roles. That, and the fact that many employers are not able (or make no effort) to truly compare the productivity between different employees, so that the weaker ones are somewhat shielded by the performance of the stronger ones.
With this in mind, it's concerning with this big ramp-up in number of CS-trained individuals. I feel we have been at the bottom of the barrel for some years already. Given that it has been well-known to everyone for many years that IT is one of the easiest areas to find employment in and that the salary is comparatively good, and the constant media focus on smartphones, apps and whatnot, it seems reasonable to assume that most people with just a faint interest and ability in IT would have pursued that path already. With this ramp-up, it seems there's a high risk that the market will be flooded by sub-par candidates and that it will be much more than what the market is already absorbing. The result will be massive unemployment among those newly trained CS-people, who were never meant to study CS to begin with.
The divisions are based on non-merit criteria.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I think I could buy into the intimidation theory. It seems feasable. The other side of the problem is what pisses me off: why are charging me three credit hours' + book amount of money for something I have already mastered!? ...
"Google" is now a code-word for "anti-white" and "anti-Asian".
"To Google" something now means to exclude, demean, and diminish white and Asian men from it.
Android systems track and monitor people not only to sell ads, but also to keep information on white and Asian men for later use to get them fired or jailed. Later it will be used to send them to the camps.
Whether you negatively discriminate against some group or positively discriminate for every other group, it doesn't matter what your motives are it's always an injustice.
Liberals: it's racist to help poor blacks from the city while excluding poor whites from Appalachia -- by definition. There's no such thing as "good racism". It's sexist to help girls get into coding while excluding boys. There's no such thing as "good sexism".
The fair way to help some people over others is when you do it based on need and merit. Help poor kids of all types to get into coding. Help kids who's schools don't offer a programming class. Don't test somebody's genes or say their skin has to be darker than 0xE0A070 to qualify -- that's sexist and racist.
This reminds me of a common practice in foreign language classes -- if a student shows up to a language class (e.g. Spanish) and is obviously too advanced for the level, then the student will not be allowed to return to that class. This is partially done for reasons of fairness (getting an A that's too easy), but mostly because it's actively detrimental for the basic students to have an advanced student in the classroom. They speak too quickly for the other students to understand, and their presence can be actively discouraging in an environment where many are struggling.
My college has long placed students with some CS knowledge in an "advanced" section of the intro programming class to avoid this issue.
When I want advice from Google Ill ask them for it.
Otherwise, they need to shut the fuck up.
University of Illinois CS Courses: CS101 (Engineering & Science), CS102 (Non-Tech), CS125 (CS Majors). What seems to be missing is providing slower on-ramps for those who did not have good early training that may be interested in majoring in CS, perhaps one or two courses for no credit, not unlike what CS undergraduate degree holders seeking an MBA would be required to take to catch up on Business/Finance subjects before they can start coursework that counts towards the MBA degree.
In other words, what mnooning said. :-)
How about you just let these "seasoned programmers" test out of the introduction classes and jump directly into the non-intro classes? Can't have that, though, as that would promote inequality further by giving them a chance to take sophomore level classes as freshman. Oh the humanity...
Indeed, I was thinking the same. If a student already has some CS background, he/she should be allowed to skip intro courses. We already do that with college assessment and AP programs for subjects such as Math, Chem, Physics and English Writing. So why not with CS? Put CS students through a comprehensive series of tests, and depending on the results, they should be allowed to skip intro-level courses (either granting full credit, or letting them take more advance courses for those credits).
I pretty much decided not to take Spanish in High School because I figured that since I lived in an area that was predominately Hispanic and the class was graded on a curve, that I'd have no chance at an 'A' when I would be competing against native speakers who were only taking the class because it was an easy 'A' for them. Personally, I favor testing students to gauge their knowledge of a subject area and placing them accordingly.
OTOH, an intro CS class should not be graded on a curve and mastery of the subject matter is relatively straight forward and the grading is more subject to an objective standard.
What is so wrong with judging a student by the quality of their work, not the color of their skin? Since when did social justice decide discrimination is acceptable so long as it only hurts people they dont like?
I thought google was a great company.
Unfortunately, we all can't be coders. Just like we all can't play basketball professionally, be creative artists, teach young kids (ever look at the demographic of elementary teachers - all white women).
I'm also thinking soul singers (blacks mostly), dancers (gays and blacks) and cheerleaders (pretty women). Why can't we keep coding to the professionals that want to do it rather than forcing the underachievers into it?
The university where I studied and, briefly, taught, began splitting Intro to Programming three ways, all three groups were self-selecting and migration to the other groups was unlimited and without penalty. Intro is a first year course and thus has no effect on your overall degree rank, it matters only that you can pass it.
- A high flyer group. Virtually all students who'd written a non-trivial program before applying tended to start in this stream. This group covers the assigned work very quickly, and then immediately goes "off piste" to explore things that are related but won't be covered in the main course. If you don't understand the material required for the assigned work, you're in the wrong stream! Questions are allowed to diverge from the intended topic, because the people who need the most help aren't present and having their time wasted with the diversion.
- Normal. The rest of the students tended to start themselves in this stream. This group spends one whole weekly session on teaching new material, and one on walking through this week's assigned work. Questions must stay on topic. If you can't follow this week's new material because you turn out not to have understood last week's after all, you need to be with the strugglers.
- A struggling group. This group gets extra weekly sessions, talking through last week's solutions line-by-line, and more 1-on-1 Q&A available. This stream costs the most to teach, but it's also the most important, because some kids are going to fail the entire course just because they didn't ever end up really understanding variables, or loops, or whatever and then they were never able to catch up. If we can rescue them, they may go on to do great things.
Anybody who can _really_ write programs ought to be able to be a "high flyer" all the way through. At worst there might be a week when some paradigm-shifting idea is introduced and they have to work a little harder. Continuations, multiple inheritance, that sort of thing. But in practice nearly every kid will drop out of this stream because their "years of experience" turn out to be undisciplined hacking and they're actually missing a lot of core ideas and principles that the Intro course wants everybody to understand. Plus of course partying is more fun than extra study, isn't it ? In its last few sessions high flyer class can be held in a two table meeting room instead of a lecture theatre. And at times about a third of the students will be in struggler stream, unable to handle some particularly vital yet tricky aspect of the course and needing an army of postgrads to answer their smart-and-yet-still-dumb questions.
Doubtless among themselves students are a little embarrassed to be among the strugglers, or even to "fall out" of high flyers as the material becomes too advanced, but overall the effect of these streams was very positive.
I had some programming background when I took CS101. I found that being good at writing spaghetti code (or even simple OO code) that works is not something that puts you ahead of other students in a computer science course, and that you actually have to learn the course material in order to pass. Who would have guessed!
If people like me don't have to take CS101 then we're slowly but surely going to end up with a community of programmers/engineers who don't have a firm enough grasp of basic concepts in computer science, and they'll be worse at their jobs for it.
A better solution is to have after-school workshops for high school kids where they can prepare for a degree in CS. They way it ought to work is that math teachers in poor neighborhoods should keep and eye out for kids who are talented at math and recommend them for the CS workshops.
Now, I imagine this sort of discrete sorting of students will probably get you sued in the US, but it would work in most other countries.
Certainly seems to be the way to bet. It makes sense to separate students with some knowledge from those with none (otherwise the pace of the class will be wrong for one or the other group), but the rest of the RFP does make it look like code (ha, see I can use their terms too) for booting white and Asian males out.
The problem with the Harvey Mudd concept is, as reported, it relied more on discouraging men than encouraging women. Men who showed enthusiasm would be shut down by the instructor by by telling them âoeYouâ(TM)re so passionate about the material and youâ(TM)re so well prepared. Iâ(TM)d love to continue our conversations but letâ(TM)s just do it one on one.â Which is a pretty damned cruel rebuke.
All the spite-filled hysterical reaction to this idea pretty much shows why it's needed.
As a white male sexistg/racist, I'm all for seperating all the minorities/genders into their own class!
As a CS professor, I can't tell you how many times we've lost students with great potential in CS because they had no prior experience but were comparing themselves to inferior students with a year or two of programming experience in high school. If you get the students who have prior experience into a "fast track" class (e.g. that compresses the first year into a single term) then both the "experienced" and "naive" students can actually learn at their own pace. Fortunately, I teach at a small college, and so most times we can identify those students and get them into a better class. And I'm actually in favor of having students with a lot of experience start by skipping a class or two. The sooner students are surrounded by their "peers" in ability/experience, the faster and more reliably they're going to engage.
But to be clear: the issue isn't that people should be actively sorting the students so that only female and non-white students are in the CS1 class. That's a horrible idea, racist, sexist, and all the other "ists" you can come up with. It is likely that the "normal" track will have more non-white and female students in it because that's what the high school demographics say: non-white/non-Asian/female students are less likely to have prior experience. But it's also true that there will be more students from rural schools in the "normal" track, because rural schools are less likely to have computer programming courses.
the way to address the diversity issue is to dumb everybody down
Kind of like raising taxes to help people via wealth transfer programs. An initiative to increase everyone's wealth wouldn't be doing "the right thing" (tm)
Never would I thought a top company come out that would essentially be "die Cis-gendered white scum" and include Asians because they're "East Arians." Someone at the top has been browsing 4chan and tumblr too long. Kinda sad that some schools have to take the deal and exclude students who genuinely want to learn.
What do they mean by "some CS knowledge?" That's too vauge, and can be taken even as knowing the basic components of a computer or cell phone, or even how to use a keyboard and use Windows, like one of the classes my high school offered years ago. What's the maximum level of knowledge before people are excluded from the intro course?
I don't think they should be called native American at all. They immigrated from Asia, as did others, some from Europe, some from Africa etc. Who cares? IMO anyone actually born in a country is "native", anyone born in another country are immigrants.
Then what's a better term for "people descended from people who were natives of North and South America in AD 1491, who had their land forcibly taken from them in European invasions from 1600 through 1900?"
the way to address the diversity issue is to dumb everybody down? Sure, that sounds like it would provide a level playing field, but the goddam field would be below sea level.
The geek's natural instinct to assert his god-given superiority at the worst possible moment can ruin the experience for everyone.
This isn't about "dumbing down," it's about getting the know-it-alls, the intellectual bullies, the inflated egos, out of the room, so others can prosper.
As another CS professor (at Random State University), I'd generally agree with this.
At the same time, I think it's ridiculous (more accurately: harmful and counter-productive) that students in CS and other disciplines are obligated to take elementary courses in subjects where they are already well along. Our university does it partly because it wants their tuition money and can inflict the requirement, partly because it's afraid it may somehow "discriminate" illegally if not all students take exactly the same list of courses, and partly because it's too lazy to give serious thought to alternatives.
In such discussions, I always offer this parallel: Would you organize the process of training "student athletes" the same way? (Usually I have to force an answer to this question.) If "no, we do not insist that all prospective football players begin with the same introductory course" then the answer at least offers a wedge to begin the discussion.
I knew nothing in my intro to programming class, but there were some guys in the class who were already programmers, and I liked having them there. They were helpful and I could see where the class might take me. My brother-in-law on the other hand had the opposite experience. He felt like he was constantly getting left behind because everyone else in the class could go further, faster.
Sounds like it's time to allow for students to test out of CS classes.
You can look at it in two ways, either against those with prior experience or a rapid learning rate or against those with little experience or a slower learning rate. Why are we speaking about putting people into ghettos[1]?
In any event there are two important questions that come to mind:
1) What happens when the AP twits have to work in a heterogeneous environment? Will they have the "soft skills" they need to function in such a work place?
2) There is the question of whether online courses are even effective. We could be holding people back. See http://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/pu...
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
[1] I actually have the same question about student athletes and folks in a specific discipline on a near by campus where they live in the same dorm; really condos; have their own library or study area, their own dining areas (no longer cafeterias, now called food courts), rec centers etc. I do not think that is condusive to getting a good education.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Grading is mostly bogus. You have a maximum of 30 numbers on a sheet of paper at the age of 19 that's supposed to determine wether you are suitable for this or that specialist job. Utter bullshit in specialist cases such as CS.
Think of specialist cases as the same with musicians. If you haven't plaved the piano since the age of 12 at least - good luck finding a conservatory that will take you. Same with ballett: You have to be good and dancing and have the right body measures and start in your single digit ages. Grades be damned, if you don't have that, you won't become a professional ballett dancer.
To go into CS simply based on a grade average, with no affinity to abstract thinking, a solid math foundation and solid teenage experience with computers and some fundamental programming skills is like joining a dance-company at the age of 19, overweight and never having moved your body around other than to get from a to b the easiest way possible, with no sports or anything similar. Silly, wouldn't that be? Excactly.
Same should apply for CS. People who have bad grades but are genius programmers - I'd bet there are quite a few of those - should have mentors asking them to join college, no matter what their report card says. Likewise, people who just won't cut it and bog the industry down with crappy experience should be asked to leave.
Here in Germany CS has no NC, because it's so hard. Which means whenever I join a CS track I have to waste 3 semesters of the college filtering out the idiots in mandatory "Programming for idiots who took CS because they like playing Wow all day 101" courses. It's a huge PITA and is the largest downside I see in taking a path to an academic degreee. I so whish I could take Math and leave programing for n00bs out and skip a semester or two.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Actually, no, American Indian is the self-chosen name of these groups. According to Wikipedia:
In 1968, the American Indian Movement was founded. In 1977, a delegation from the International Indian Treaty Council, an arm of AIM, elected to collectively identify as "American Indian", at the United Nations Conference on Indians in the Americas at Geneva, Switzerland. Some activists and public figures of indigenous descent, such as Russell Means, say that they prefer "American Indian" to the more recently adopted "Native American".
Wiz kid with novice.
Wiz kid learns to teach.
Novice learns computers.
Each gets the other's grade.
How is that cruel? Should the professor let the student with "more knowledge" derail the entire class on introductory C syntax with a long-wided digression into the merits of Hadoop and Erlang? Or should he do what's being suggested here - "Hey, this is interesting, let's talk about it after class?"
Seriously, why this proposal from Google is even remotely controversial is unfathomable to me.
Your argument seems to be contradictory:
1) Everyone in this country is an American.
2) If any group of Americans is underrepresented, it is solely the responsibility of that group to fix the systemic problems within US society that cause that lack of representation.
It seems to me that if we are truly one nation of Americans, we as a nation have a collective responsibility to ensure that nobody gets left behind. If African Americans are struggling educationally, the attitude of, "well, I'm not going to worry about it because it is African American's responsibility to fix the situation," is akin to not worrying about a major US city hit by a natural disaster or your neighbors' house being on fire.
If we are one nation, then the onus is upon every one of us to do all we can to help undermine the barriers that keep a group of Americans, simply through accident of birth, from achieving social parity. You can help by simply volunteering your time, or as Google has done, volunteering your money if you have it (and many Google employees also volunteer their precious time as well).
Little boys have just as much right to an education as little girls
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
How is that cruel? Should the professor let the student with "more knowledge" derail the entire class on introductory C syntax with a long-wided digression into the merits of Hadoop and Erlang? Or should he do what's being suggested here - "Hey, this is interesting, let's talk about it after class?"
Seriously, why this proposal from Google is even remotely controversial is unfathomable to me.
Why would the student be discussing anything about Hadoop or Erlang during a lecture about C syntax? Your argument reminds me of a course I am TA'ing in which there are students on Day 1 asking why we aren't using Java or Python or SAS/SPSS for course about R programming.
...getting budding industrial engineers, statisticians and mathemeticians , computer scientists, machinists, designers, and STEM people to talk to each other more often rather than fighting over turf or ignoring each other.
Don't ever listen to what the education bureacracy thinks. They're always wrong.
You can stop right there. This is bullshit.
People, it is called a "pipeline".
When data, or your in-production widget, or whatever are done at station x, they then move to station x+1.
The stunning lack of a well-organized pipeline at the front end of CS education is not about gender, or opportunity. It is a measure of how badly managed colleges are - even though their rate of growth of tuition beats the S&P. Charging more for the same is not the same as returning more value. Colleges aren't returning more value - by all real measures they are returning less. In that climate where less is acceptable, a broken pipeline for moving more experienced students to the next area is unsurprising.
Many of my courses had "you will learn this later" but the next class had "you should have learned this earlier". In the academic world where that is the norm can anyone be surprised that such a simple (nearly moronic) solution has such great results.
This is not novel or innovative. It just shows how crappy colleges are at teaching to new learners.
The summary focuses on the hot button issues of supposed "exclusion" rather than the psychology of learning which this approach emphasizes; "traditional" approaches have produced the current mono-culture dominance in CS, and from even the most rudimentary management approaches that in itself is a weakness. Diversity is fundamental to a diversity in problem solving and actual workable solutions for long-term success. Recognizing that and addressing it now is a good thing.
I don't know, perhaps you should ask the GP poster, who posited that somehow, anybody showing enthusiasm is being "shut down by the professor" who is "cruelly rebuking them" by telling them "Let's talk about this item of common interest together after class, rather than distracting everybody in the class with topics that aren't relevant to the class."
Which actually seems like a pretty nice way of putting it, if you ask me.
Twenty years ago when I studied my BIT I spent the better part of the first 2 week's worth of lab time having to show the newbs where the power and reset switches were on computers. From what I hear the problem has only gotten worse since then. Too many people with no interest in computers whatsoever are taking on IT courses because of the "pay packet promise" at the end. Flooding the market with this type of graduate does nothing to help prospective employers - they have to waste their time and resources by basically ignoring applicant's paper qualifications and find other ways to see if they actually have any useful knowledge or skills.
Google should be doing everything possible to weed out the novices early on so they can stop wasting everybody's time and money. C'mon Google, you're supposed to be good at Big Data problems like this!
Not "anybody showing enthusiasm" Specifically "guys" showing enthusiasm. Nobody but you (assuming you're the same AC) said anything about Hadoop or Erlang or any other irrelevant subject during a lecture about C; the language of the course was Python in any case.
And what the enthusiastic guys were told was "You're so passionate about the material and you're so well prepared. I'd love to continue our conversations but let's just do it one on one." This was a _stock_ answer, so obviously not a sincere invitation but rather merely a politely-phrased rebuke.
My experience in this goes back over 30 years ago, to when one of my friends was one of three women Electrical Engineering majors. She lived in the same house, and was in the same intro circuits analysis class. She bailed a few weeks in and changed majors. Why? To quote: "Because you guys have been building Heathkits and fixing televisions since you were 10 years old. I haven't." In short, she was intimidated by the *perception* that she couldn't keep up with us. Nobody was making her feel unwelcome. And she would have probably sliced out the liver of anyone who tried, but that's another story... she had fight in her. But despite having the grades and doing well, she felt intimidated for no good reason whatsoever. She would have done fine. That Heathkit experience helped, sure, but it wasn't make-or-break.
She ended up in ceramic engineering, which was a great fit for her, so that much is good. But IMO she ended up in a good place for the wrong reasons.
The problem here is trying to convince people that some negative self-perceptions are completely unwarranted. Early experience is not what makes-or-breaks your ability to do well in the advanced classes that really count for something.
I *do* think hands-on experience is good for building the self-confidence that eliminates the negative self-perception. Maybe it sound silly, but perhaps some "remedial tinkering" classes just to get some bench time in a low-pressure environment is what it takes to build some self-confidence.
My first year compsci class (in 1996) was intimidating due to the students the article was talking about. However, what was really intimidating was that the prof had asked the class the first day how many people had taken a coding course in high school. Since most had (city people), he decided to barely skim over the first 1/3 of the course in two days. In addition to being behind 1/3 of a semester in our first year right off the bat, us small town hicks also had to worry about money and time for rent, car, laundry, meals...
The beauty of intro CS classes is you don't need prior knowledge or experience. Anyone with a bit of logic should find it easy. I went into a 4 year, not much more than knowing computers work entirely on numbers. For my first experience in programming, I got dropped into a C/C++ class that dealt with datastructures and algorithms. I think I was the only one who got an A, I never studied, always finished my test 10-15 minutes before everyone else, and did my weekly programming assignments the night before.
A lot of people changed majors after that class. I found it non-challenging, with no prior programming experience, but some stuff was still important.
"...may be more likely to create a non-welcoming environment,"
I read this as "...asshole IT people treat everyone else like idiots". We all know one if we aren't one ourselves....
that this was about doing something to allow students with CS experience to skip introductory classes.
It's not the 80s anymore. There is no material obstacle for anyone who is interested in computers to gain programming experience. Studying computer science without any programming experience is like studying translation without knowing the source language. And the expectation of being spoonfed knowledge, instead of trying things out, is not a good prerequisite for CS. For people who don't know where to start, there's a shitload of free online courses. There is no excuse.
I attend an all-female college. I took an introductory level CS class in which maybe two of thirty young women had any prior programming experience.
I was one of those women. I had to make sure to shut up in class so that I did not create an intimidating environment for the young women who were seeing it all for the first time.
I would have loved the opportunity to be in a class that had only those with programming experience.
It doesnt eliminate the business pressures the pressures that promote whitw & Asian males in the tech business.
I took AP (chem and calculus) classes in high school. I think I scored a 3 on the AP exams, so did not place out of those classes. Instead, when I got to college, I was put into honor's versions of those classes. There were 2 problems with this approach. As a good student, I was punished twice. Once for having taken them in HS while many of my classmates took the easier regular version of those classes, some of whom scored better overall and got scholarships based on their academic grades. The time I got punished is when taking those honor's version in college, I was competing against a better candidate pool and thus had little time for other activities (girls). The other issue is that those classes were a time drain that could have been better used towards other academic classes. Later on, I learned how students would intentionally rig the game by taking easy classes to boost their GPA. I guess it was too late when I tried to play that game. One of my friends was fully fluent in Spanish, but took that just because he could do an easy course load. Similarly, I had friends who failed out of Biology, switched into Psychology, and got into Med School. I guess I lost faith in the fairness of the system by then.
I bet you cannot see, for the life of you, why this is a fucked up and contradictory statement. HINT: Separate but Equal.