The sad state of computer science education

[Panphobia]

Basically all the assignments are either, brief 10-15 line programs, or simple concepts, I thought we were going to go more in depth with OOP, but it seems that, in order to pass the test you needed to have more understanding than what was taught, I already knew OOP, so I had no problem, but the class average for that test was 65.

[wtd]

As in most areas of learning, if you allow your learning to be constrained by the curriculum of whatever class you're taking, then you're failing as a student.

Yes, there are some fascinating classes you can take, but the whole point of school is to teach you how to learn, so you can go out and take initiative to further your own education.

When it comes to computer science, maybe you aced your Java class, and did well with C++, but always felt like Haskell was just incomprehensible. You probably felt that way because it's very different on a conceptual level. So dive in and figure it out. Or maybe you won't be able to. Only one way to find out!

[TerranceN]

"As in most areas of learning, if you allow your learning to be constrained by the curriculum of whatever class you're taking, then you're failing as a student."

That's signature worthy. Unfortunately there's a 150 character limit, so I had to make it an image.

I wish more UWaterloo students realized this. There simply isn't enough time for the classes to teach everyone everything.

[mirhagk]

@wtd Ideally the point of school is to teach you how to learn, but almost every teacher I've seen (minus a few great ones) cares only about learning the material, not learning how to learn.

People SHOULD self-teach themselves nearly everything. I think schools should be minimal in teaching material, rather teaching how to teach, providing some guidelines for finding materials on a subject, and then evaluating how much you can figure out about that subject. Sadly only a handful of students even know how to find further materials on their-self, and complain when the teacher doesn't teach well. With the internet nowadays nothing the teacher teaches, you can't figure out on your own.

[SmokeMonster]

Quote:

Basically they didn't even know what they were doing, let alone how to do it. Yet all of these students who can't write a simple haskell function are going to pass the course with 70s.

Did you consider that perhaps writing a haskell function is not the ultimate goal of the course? Every course has a set of teaching goals and most of the time good profs distribute grades across all teaching goals. For example in an OS final a student may royally bomb the questions that require you to write multithreaded C code and yet pass the course if they ace the questions on more theoretical stuff such as scheduling algorithms, virtual memory management, filesystems etc. Such a student is not going to be submitting pull requests to the Linux kernel anytime soon but at the same time I wouldn't say that there is anything outrageous about them getting a pass on their transcript for the course.

mirhagk @ Wed Nov 28, 2012 10:47 am wrote:

Does anyone else see this in their schools, and does anybody else get annoyed at the students who manage to pass when they really shouldn't have.

Not at all. First of all it's not my place to judge who should be passing and who shouldn't. And while I don't think everyone of my fellow students in my year is a genius, I certainly think they are smart enough and intelligent enough to deserve a 60 or a 65 in courses which is what is required to pass.

Quote:

Even in the abstract courses it's very possible for people to just memorize definitions and copy assignment answers. It's hard to find people (even in higher years) that can truly think on their own.

This is a myth. Just like in any major including medicine and engineering there are going to courses which are memorization heavy and there others that are not. As someone who has finished three years of university I've only had two maybe three CS courses which were big on memorization. Most courses test your actual understanding of the material than your ability to memorize stuff and vomit it out at the exam. It's not possible for people to memorize and get good grades in abstract courses such as Automata, Algorithms, Databases. I don't know any classes where averages are in the high 80s or low 90s as you guys are claiming. At my school the averages are

1st year: high 50s low 60s
2nd year: mostly mid-high 60s
3rd year: around 70ish
4th year: ??

Perhaps those high grades you are talking about are in HS in which case it really doesn't matter and is not really out of the norm since grades in HS are high across the board in all subjects not just CS.