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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.
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.
Most people I know have half a dozen geographies in their genetic background and everyone is a different shade of color. Race is now irrelevant.
What does matter is what people do. Having someone - anyone - in a class that screws up the bell curve makes others feel bad. In most of those classes the ace student is celebrated, but obviously not here. PR over results.
CS is overrated anyway. 10% should be CS, 30% should be Software Engineers, and 50% grunt work Programmers. All very different education.
That's not the appropriate comparison. This is just simply separating people into separate but equal queues for the fountains of knowledge that is our education system. I'd say it's probably also best if they sit at the back of the school buses so as not to intimidate other passengers. I for one cannot think of any examples of how this has ever caused problems in the past.
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...
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. Regardless discriminating against people because of their race, whether or not it is to right a "wrong" or not is itself wrong to me. If a particular ethnicity has issues with their relative proportion of certain professions let them start their own programs to encourage their kids to go into those fields. Having the government or corporations create university programs that exclude the others to try to help the minorities out is condescending at best "Hey poor little black boy here's an extra scoop of opportunity I sure hope it helps." and encourages discrimination to continue since it reinforces the idea that people should be treated different depending on what their background happens to be.
Anyways find this even worse in some ways in Canada where I live. We don't generally call ourselves American though I have ran into that a fair bit with europeans some of which that call the whole continent the Americas and people from there American. Anyways makes me laugh when I run into a "proud African-American" supporting affirmative action in Canada.
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.
Exactly. Kind of like they are saying "most people like you (whatever that means) are well off, so what the hell is your problem?". or "in the past other groups were excluded so it doesn't matter how qualified you might be because of who your ancestors were we want to treat you differently". Hmm where have we heard that thought process before. Treat everyone the same no worst no better. No incentives should your parents be part of a particular group whether is is Nation of Islam or a country club. Only allow scholarships based on merit and financial aid based on financial need.
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!? ...
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.
Not quite. Race SHOULD BE irrelevant but it's most definitely not, particularly these days. Gender SHOULD BE irrelevant but it's most definitely not. What should be of the utmost importance is a person's ability. As a historical reference, look at how the chemical industry got started back in the Victorian era. A British research student discovered the world's first artificial dye. But his teachers were all German. Why? Because back then, the Germans were very good at opening universities and technical schools and letting anyone attend based on merit, never mind their family background. To the British, such behavior was very much lower-class so they blew a golden opportunity to capitalize on a totally new science which the Germans took to the bank.
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. :-)
CS is overrated anyway. 10% should be CS, 30% should be Software Engineers, and 50% grunt work Programmers. All very different education.
I take it the other 10% should be in math?
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).
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.
As a white male sexistg/racist, I'm all for seperating all the minorities/genders into their own class!
If everyone thought like you, this approach might work. While your vision is idyllic, it's completely divorced from reality. Disappointingly, most people DON'T think or act according your logic. The evidence for my argument is all around you, being rubbed in your face, every day of your life. Physically discriminatory stereotypes rule the world you live in (age, race, sex, etc.) and if you are unaware of that then you need to be a lot more introspective.
Since the premise of your argument is wrong, you may need to find a different solution.
A problem exists. WHY?
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.
Soon we will be getting told. We've always been at war with men.
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?"
I think the bell curve is likely the entire problem. There simply should not be one. If kids are failing the subjects, they shouldn't be getting C and B grades because the smart people got removed to be in their own class. If the smart people excel, by all means have the ability to push them further and if that means another class, fine. But if the not so smart people are failing, the options should not be adjust the grading scale, but to supplement the education in ways that make them satisfactory students.
People learn in different ways. Perhaps the answers might be in sending teachers more gifted to smarter kids to those smart classes and concentrate more efforts on the no so smart kids with teachers and course material better prepared for their abilities. I was that way in school, I could read something and pretty much tell you where in the book the information was covered a week after. But after a lecture, I could tell you what color the teacher's socks were but nothing about the topic covered. I remember one teacher that I nicknamed king crab because he always had chalk dust on his pants near his privates if there was a lecture and I knew it was going to be a bad day. Other students need told instead of reading and some might need a varying mix of it and other things like hands on practice too.
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.
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+
Of course, since they're talking about sorting people on the basis of being CS knowledge, not skin color, what you're saying doesn't really make sense. A dirt poor white male who doesn't have a CS background gets in - whereas a hispanic girl who's been winning hackathons through highschool doesn't. Sure, there will be more white and asian males who don't get in, but it's not about race or gender.
The introductory classes end up being for actual beginners. Is that really so terrifying?
[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
What do they mean by "some CS knowledge?"
It's not a "they". It's Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations.
She put her name on this. She's the racist/sexist person responsible for this.
The amount of furor in the comment along the lines of "Oh noes, people who don't already know how to code won't be given the traditional beatdown!" is kind of horrifying. Yeesh. Having a beginning class that's for actual beginners sounds like an awesome idea. Let the folks with some background test out, or if they're not quite ready to do that, put them in something like an online course where they can fill in the gaps at their own pace.
Ideally, having some kind of acclerated intro (maybe two semesters crammed into one?) for folks with some background might be a great alternative if you have the time and faculty. The impression I get is that they don't. It also might be useful to train profs on how to manage students who are being assholes to their classmates - but seriously, CS profs who are already overcommitted? I can at least see why this is not the route they're going.
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".
It actually wouldn't surprise me if the majority of kids who got to stay home and do the classes online still did better than those going to class, primarily through self-motivation to learn the stuff and not just jammed in the class to make quota.
I managed to exceed the knowledge of my teacher in grade 7 after one class, without having a computer at home, and never met a teacher that knew more about programming computers than I did until I went to University.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Janitors.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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).
At my Uni, I just talked to the dept chair person and told them I already had a computer background. They signed off for my to skip some 101 classes that were otherwise required to even graduate. Maybe people need to just ask.
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.
Again, my background wasn't in CS (nor in Neurbiology, my current field, or anything even close) but in my experience this approach will get you far. There may be times when you want a laid back review - otherwise, why waste your time and money? Push yourself, take a more challenging course, and get more out of it. I got into all kinds of courses without the pre-reqs, just by speaking to the instructors ahead of time and convincing them I'd be okay. Similarly, I convinced my department to let me substitute interesting upper level classes for boring lower level requirements in a number of cases. And had a much more interesting education because of it.
The idea of whining because you can't get into an introductory class because you already know much of the material strikes me as pretty silly - sheesh, breeze through the online class and go and do something more productive with your time.
I realize this might be hard to follow, but there are in fact multiple links, not a single article. And, in fact, you are conflating two different programs, one aimed at college level courses, and another aimed at high school teachers.
IIRC, Eskimo is traditionally a group of Canadians living around Hudson's Bay, and they prefer some other name, which I don't remember. If you want, you could call Alaskan Natives the Innuit ... but I'm not sure that covers all of them.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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.
If they won't budge ask about a proficiency test.
No, I'm sure he means: Do athletes take PE? Would you expect someone coming in on a full-ride Division I gymnastics scholarship to be forced to take the PE class in basic tumbling before they showed up for the gymnastics team's training camp? That would be insanity. Likewise, a semester spent teaching someone where the semicolons go in Java is a waste of everyone's time if that person is up to speed on the basics of coding and is ready for introductory data structures.
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.
Journalism School.
She probably has a degree in 'Education.' Likely an advanced degree. A frightening thing to do to oneself.
that this was about doing something to allow students with CS experience to skip introductory classes.
I think the bell curve is likely the entire problem. There simply should not be one.
How many classes did you take that were graded on a strict bell curve where there were a certain number of each grade to be awarded, and the scores were forced into that grading distribution? I don't think I had even one course graded that way.
I had many courses that were graded on a curve, but the formula was generally based on a percentage of the top X scores achieved in the course. In theory, the entire class could earn As, but it would not be possible to have all students fail.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
It doesnt eliminate the business pressures the pressures that promote whitw & Asian males in the tech business.
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.
Well, if you are going to count people who "immigrated" to America 10K or more years ago as not being native, you might as well call everyone African as that where Homo sapiens originated!
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.
They're called First Nations in Canada! I bet that'd pop that zit you call a head clear off.