Help deciding back-up (third choice) university

[Prabhakar Ragde]

Horus @ Wed Dec 09, 2009 12:41 pm wrote:

True that, except shouldn't the school consider teaching the languages that the students need to know immediately rather than a language that can be taught later?

Maybe -- if our only goal was to prepare students for their first co-op work term. Note that we had a decade of teaching students using Java in first year. The professor who developed the second-year course that followed put the following question on an assignment: read in a file of numbers and print it out twice. He used this several times (you can still find this question on CS 241 assignment 3 this term) and a significant fraction of the students could not do it, or wrote a program that took O(n^2) time for n numbers. Do you think they were prepared for their first co-op job?

We talked to the employers about our plans. Some of them had already complained about the programming skills of our students. They were on board with the changes we proposed. They're under no illusion that what students learn in first year can be immediately useful. They hire first-year students for aptitude and potential.

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When scheme was introduced in 2008, the coop rate for first year cs dropped significantly.

And the biggest economic downturn in seventy years had nothing to do with that, of course.

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Sure, recession might played a role, but it did not affect much for SE which is still 71%.

SE has a hundred students, CS about four hundred. The cutoffs are similar, but their "average average" is slightly higher, and they require significant prior experience to CS in high school, whereas CS doesn't. If you crafted a similar demographic by selecting CS students with comparable averages and experience, you'll probably get a similar employment rate.

SE students, in their 1A course, largely did what they did in high school. Their marks were pretty good, I'm sure. The marks in the 1A CS course, which is something completely new and challenging, were lower. That probably didn't help the immediate employment prospects of CS students. But it will leave them in a better position for the future.

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Now, SE and CS have almost identical courses with the exception of the CS course, CS is learning scheme in first year, while SE goes for C. So doesn't scheme lower the first year coop rate?

SE students learn Scheme in 1B. CS students learn C in 1B. Neither group goes out on co-op until after that.

We'll talk again once you go through CS 136. --PR

(PS: UBC is switching to Scheme in first year.)