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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?
You'd also then have to teach them to teach.
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...
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?
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.