The Weirdness of University Computer Science

By -
I am looking over some syllabi of introduction to programming courses for ideas, and something that is stunning is that typically, 60% or 70% of a student's grade is based on written tests, while only 20% or 30% is based on... programming!

It's like "teaching" someone to swim by making sure they can answer questions about swimming.

Comments

  1. Silas Barta12:55 PM

    In fairness ... whenever it's revealed that supposed CS grads can't pass the Fizzbuzz test, someone points out that "Computer Science Isn't Programming", and is supposed to be about the theoretical understanding of computation. (Example).

    The course you mention is supposed to be about programming, of course, but being in a CS program, the same point applies.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah11:50 PM

      Silas, I am quite sympathetic to arguments suggesting it is different to study X and to study the theory of X. Computer science is a fine discipline, and people studying it at Yale or MIT, prepping for careers as computer scientists, does not bother me in the least. But at less elite colleges, where there is very little chance the graduates will become CS professors, and where they are very explicitly pitching their degrees to those who want to get programming jobs... well, then, I think, they should teach programming!

      Delete
  2. Anonymous6:45 PM

    Ken MKesey's son was a college wrestler at the university of oregon. He was traveling to a tournament in a university van when the stdent driver lost control on the snowy road. The van tumbed down a ravine, and Jed Kesey was fatally injured.

    Subsequently, all student drivers of university vehicles at u of o must take a one hour safety course and pass a practical test. The test consists of backing a van into a perpendicular parking space with the aid of a spotter. I'm sure countless insurance dollars have been saved.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more