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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.
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.
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?"
Humans.
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".
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).
"Apache" isn't originally the name of a tribe either.
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.