High School question.

[Stefon]

My high school only offers one computer science course and it is at the college level. Obviously there is no point of me taking it. Are schools required to offer university level computer science courses?

[A.J]

Well, I am not sure if it is a requirement per-say, but I do believe you need to take a university level CS course for university if you are thinking about pursuing CS.

[TheGuardian001]

As far as I know, no school is required to offer any specific course beyond the highschool graduation requirements.

I know my school offered the ability to take courses it didn't offer at other nearby schools. You could check at your guidance/student services office to see if your school offers anything similar.

[Tony]

Stefon @ Tue May 11, 2010 8:56 pm wrote:

Are schools required to offer university level computer science courses?

No.

A.J @ Tue May 11, 2010 9:01 pm wrote:

I do believe you need to take a university level CS course for university if you are thinking about pursuing CS.

No.

http://compsci.ca/blog/the-disadvantages-of-high-school-programming/

[Stefon]

TheGuardian001 @ Tue May 11, 2010 9:06 pm wrote:

check at your guidance/student services office to see if your school offers anything similar.

The only one offered is the college level one, plus I go to a Catholic School and they force you to take a religion course each year. So it doesnt look like I have a good chance of getting into Waterloo.

[TheGuardian001]

Stefon wrote:

The only one offered is the college level one, plus I go to a Catholic School and they force you to take a religion course each year. So it doesnt look like I have a good chance of getting into Waterloo.

I go to a catholic school too... What I mean is that even if the course isn't offered at your school, some schools have programs that let you take the course you want at some other school, while still staying enrolled in your current school.

Oh, and CS isn't actually a requirement for most CS university courses. They seem to have realized that most schools either don't have CS courses, or have horribly staffed CS courses. Take a couple of high level maths in 11 and 12 (function, adv. functions, Calculus & vectors, etc) and you should be fine for getting into CS programs.

Edit: huh. If you click on a link that's inside the "topic review" frame (like the compsci blog Tony linked to) when posting a reply, the page opens inside that frame, instead of in the main browser frame. weird.

[Dan]

Stefon @ 11th May 2010, 9:51 pm wrote:

The only one offered is the college level one, plus I go to a Catholic School and they force you to take a religion course each year. So it doesnt look like I have a good chance of getting into Waterloo.

Not sure what it is like now but when i was in the public system they only offered Computer Science as a mixed (M) level course in grade 12 and this was standard across most public high schools in Ontario. However some universities (including Waterloo) would count it as a university (U) level course when applying for the Computer Science program (not that it was required tho).

Not sure if this is still the case but i would not be too worried about it affecting your admission application. As others have stated, you can probably talk to a guide counselor to work something out. My high school chose not to run a grade 12 Computer Science class however I was allowed to take it as an independent study. My brother was faced with the same problem at the same school and took it as an online course.

[Euphoracle]

CS at my HS was a waste of time. They didn't run the grade 12 one either, but I didn't really care because I was confident in my ability to use my grades to get me in (after realizing that it was not a requirement). To be honest, I'm not sure if UW even ranks people who take HS CS higher than those who haven't. In first year they basically tell you 'forget it all' so I'm left to wonder if there's actually an advantage to not taking it in HS

[Sur_real]

Well I'm in the TDSB and our high school have the ICS4U1 program. We learn web-based rather than software-based languages. Some topics that we covered or are in the progess of covering are HTML, PHP and MySQL.

[unoho]

ya.. it's not required but it says:
"Grade 11 computer science is highly recommended, Grade 12 computer science would be an asset"

[mono-1-rulz]

In our school, the ICS4U course is treated like a joke. For some reason, they decided to give us a new teacher who hasn't programmed since his university years, instead of the more experienced teacher. So basically our teacher relearns with us all the stuff he is teaching us.

[Tony]

mono-1-rulz @ Wed May 12, 2010 7:46 pm wrote:

So basically our teacher relearns with us all the stuff he is teaching us.

That seems to be the trend. You are definitely not alone in that situation....

[revangrey]

mono-1-rulz wrote:

So basically our teacher relearns with us all the stuff he is teaching us.

Ha. You should feel grateful, my teacher spent all of today's class chatting with two students and not teaching us anything as usual.

Also she refuses to answer ANY questions. /endrant

[Prabhakar Ragde]

unoho @ Wed May 12, 2010 4:07 pm wrote:

ya.. it's not required but it says:
"Grade 11 computer science is highly recommended, Grade 12 computer science would be an asset"

That's been there for years. I wish they would change it. Mostly high school CS just does damage. There are a few exceptions but too few.

[Kam]

yea... CS is a joke in my school as well. We are forced to follow the textbook class by class and yet this is a AP CS course. We are given no challenges at all by the teacher - just the chapter by chapter routine. My previous grade 10 and 11 CS teacher was more reliable as I learned both CS and some bit of math from him (boolean algebra is so much fun!)

It sucks, but yes, that's how most high school CS courses are. I only did well in the AP exam because of the programming I did outside of class time. (BTW: did anyone think the AP CS exam was a complete joke? It was way too easy in my opinion)