Comment by tjl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tjl | Hacker News Reader

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The problem with what you're asking is that it's one more course you're trying to fit into a curriculum. My engineering department already gutted their first year calculus course by making most of it (about 3/4) pre-calculus after finding out that a majority of students weren't prepared.

I was asked to tutor a first year engineering student in programming as she was failing. I ended up spending most of the time helping her conceptualize the problem and breaking it down into steps. Once she learnt that, she could manage the syntax aspects of C++. She ended up with a grade in the 60s which isn't bad considering she had a grade in the low 40s after the midterm.

When I was a TA for thermodynamics, I noticed that we would get a bimodal distribution on the midterm exam. Thermodynamics isn't hard once you understand it. We'd get the people who didn't understand with grades in the 40s, but the people who did had grades in the 70s and 80s. The prof said that was pretty common. The objective was to get as many people from the lower curve to the upper curve by the end of the term. You'd typically have around 3 to 5 of a class of 80 fail by the end. Those were the people who just didn't get it. I'm sure that thermo is one of many courses like this.

At the high school level or the uni level?

At the high school level, I remember taking a lot of required BS courses in high school, including public speaking, cooking/child care, a business course, and PE. No one suggested gutting core areas to make room for CS. Or at least, I didn't.

At the uni level I really don't think this would add significant overhead. Take your N sections of intro and switch one or more to intro-intro. Then get other departments to allow either one to fulfill a CS breadth requirement. Students who start with intro-intro can stuff an extra CS course in at some point after the intro sequence bottle neck.

I had none of those required courses in high school aside from one PE course. In grades 7 and 8 we had combined shop and home economics courses (in each year) which I thought was a good idea since everybody learnt to cook, sew, and do some basic carpentry. I saw so many people who couldn't cook at university. That would have been different if people learnt to cook in school.

This was at the university level. The problem is that my engineering department has a hard time fitting in courses. If you need an additional CS course that's one course covering something else that doesn't get included. We already merged our separate probability and statistics courses into a single course to make room for more intro materials.

For accreditation, all of our courses are broken down into having some of: Math, Intro Science, Engineering Science, and Engineering Design (and possibly none of these). You need a set amount in each category to get accreditation. Other departments have the same requirements, but their programs are designed to meet it. My department lets the student decide most of their upper year courses from across the university. So, if you decide to take a bunch of CS courses, you'll miss out and need to make it up on other courses. By the end, you need more Engineering Science and Engineering Design which isn't hard to do if you have mostly engineering courses, but pure CS courses basically give you nothing on these.

Until you actually participate in these kinds of discussions you don't know how carefully the overall curriculum is planned. Students going through my program have had a number of excellent suggestions, but it's hard to make changes and still meet all the requirements.

My department used to have more courses per term. Originally, there was 7 a term (I think), then there were 6. They've since moved to 5. That means you get 40 courses instead of 48 or 56.

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