Comment by tiffanyh 7 days ago
> There is a tension here that is being understated which is that people of every major now take the intro-level CS class because programming is integral to everything.
Why doesn’t the CS department have a different intro class for CS majors and non-CS majors.
That’s a common practice in the mathematics, physics, etc. departments.
(To have harder intro classes for the students majoring in your department vs those who don’t.)
Weed out courses do have various problems. Some of it is regulatory - certain public or public funded universities don't let you eliminate large portions of your cohort. Graduation rate is a part of many college rankings, so there's also an incentive to not fail.
I don't think it's completely wrong. Failing a student after he or she sunk a ton of money into it is really not ideal. IMO it seems really easy to pass prospective students the first few chapters of your CS textbook/lectures then test them as a prerequisite for enrollment, before they enrol. This would be close to free, filter out a lot of would be dropouts and just save money and effort all around.
Doing weed out courses on purpose I think is elitist and unnecessary, but computer science does require understanding of some hard topics. Linear algebra, theoretical computer science and the like may have very high failure rates, but are a necessary pre-requisite to become a computer scientist.
It's not completely necessary. But I will say, as someone who began their career as an 18 year old "self-taught developer" then completed a CS degree at 30, I found linear algebra to be the most useful bit of knowledge that was missing from my kit.
Two reasons:
1. Back when I was in CS, the department was much smaller than it was today. This was after the 80s programmer crash, and so they just didn't have enough professors or resources to teach as many students as were interested in being CS majors.
2. You are able to teach to a higher standard if you've filtered the students that enter your department. You can have one or two people fail OS rather than half the class. At some point, it is reasonable to see if the students are committed, and they get to prove themselves a couple of years after high schools, which worked better for people like me who weren't very accomplished until they get to college.
They need to get rid of the concept of weed out courses. It's bad for learning. If you are paying 30-50K a year for an education, course availability should be a given. Don't use the bell curve as an excuse to deny students an education, or if you are going to use a threshold, use a fixed one, not one that limits by percentage of students. The fat cat admins and professors need to be fired. Too many schools take the students' money and plow it into research and other areas, with zero regard for undergraduate education. "You are in university now, it's sink or swim. Can't make it? Too bad." This attitude is especially prevalent in the state/public unis, especially places like Berkeley where demands exceeds supply. Your traditional private colleges like Dartmouth and Harvard don't have this problem.
Ideally people who can't handle the course should get filtered out before being accepted to the college, so they don't waste any money. But since it's impossible to filter reliable at that stage, surely it makes sense to also filter early on in the course. (from the perspective of the student. If the college wants to take more of their money they could still direct them to a different, easier/more suitable subject).
A lot of schools these days weed out at the application level: if you have a great portfolio from middle school through high school, great! You have it made.
I sort of like the change to redeem yourself during the first two years of your university if you didn't have the ideal secondary school experience to get into a hot department of a hot university. CC can do that as well, I guess, but it is a much harder hill to climb.
My university had a proof based, let's construct the natural numbers from axioms and prove that a+b == b+a type course as the first class for aspiring math majors. It was a "weed out" course, not in the sense that it was particularly hard, but more in the sense of introducing students to this is what 'real' math is actually about, and not so much the stuff you were doing in high school. Some students decided each year that they didn't want to do 'real' math and went on to focus on other things.
Yep.
At my university, after the usual calculus/diff eq/lin alg sequence everyone in STEM takes, we had “intro to advanced mathematics” that was proof based, taught in the spring, and a pre-req for everything higher level (abstract algebra, real analysis, etc). Most math programs have a similar “first proofs” class as their “weed out” class.
In that case the weed-out course is _after_ the calculus/diff eq/lin alg sequence then, not the intro math course.
Math isn't popular enough to have weed out courses, and math professors of higher division classes don't mind failing half the class. There isn't much of a drawback to letting as many people who want to major in math.
But intro STEM math is used as a weed out for other majors. You aren't going to get far in CS if you aren't able to ace your basic calculus classes.
At least when I went to school, intro CS was a weed out course for getting into the CS department in the first place, along with calculus based physics that potential engineer and physic majors also had to take.
I think these days it’s a bit different in that many schools allow high schoolers to apply directly to the CS department? But then it would be a matter of scale I guess, they usually have clinical professors run these classes because they demand full time attention.