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Comment by stdbrouw | Hacker News Reader

> What really surprised me was the core principle at British unversities - "don't assume prior knowledge of anything".

The rationale is that you want to give 18 year olds the opportunity to pick a field of study that they're excited about now rather than forcing them to choose something based on what kind of education their parents thought proper for them six years ago. If a single "intro to programming" course and a slightly easier first math course can onboard smart students who otherwise would be hopelessly lost, and the only downside is that a couple of better-prepared students feel a bit bored, that's a small price to pay.

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That is just an excuse. You could easily take an "intro to programming" before trying to get into the school. All it does is lower the bar of entry and you can only teach so much in the time given so it will ultimately take time away in the other end.

What's wrong with a low bar to tertiary education? It lets disadvantaged kids get in and catch up. As long as the standards are high by the end everything is fine right?

In theory? Nothing at all.

In practice, some see the fact many tech employers give coding tests to people with CS degrees as a sign the standards at the end aren't as consistently high as one might hope.

This is a stupid argument. Is one to suppose that the brain teasers that were popular in interviews 15 years ago implied that universities weren’t teaching people to be clever or something?

I think a lot of interviewing style is fashion driven.

Also computer science isn’t necessarily about actually coding anyway. It’s mostly about algorithms and structure and complexity. Similarly, anyone who knows anything about university mathematics courses does not expect fresh graduates to be particularly good at arithmetic

The difference is that programming is an essential craft. Algorithms are fundamental here, but it seems like teaching „structure and complexity“ equals to teaching paradigms that where en vogue a generation ago. This kind of knowledge is distracting, pretentious and even harmful.

On the other hand, I find it hard to imagine you can make a multiple year degree out of just programming. Hence why the best courses will have a mix of both practical and theory.

It works in practice as well. That is what junior college is all about. About a third of Berkeley graduates came from JCs. Transferring in at the JC level is competitive and hard and getting out is always hard.

CS isn't programming, so I don't think it's unreasonable to make sure a candidate from a CS background has the basics down.

Nothing, if you let people who do not want to waste time (and tuition fees!) on repeating basic stuff skip ahead.

I also studied CS on polish university and I feel we had the best of both worlds:

Initial programming courses were electives, where you could choose between more basic or more advanced "intro to programming" course. Basic had python, while advanced had c and c++.

Similarly logic classes were in basic and advanced groups and it was easy to choose the group you want and switch groups during course.

In fact, I was the guy who came for CS degree after never doing great at math or CS in high school and it reaaaaaally helped me to get up to speed with the others.

If those people who do not waste time are so smart why they have to be hold by the hand and given curriculum? (tuition fees you can count as means for getting a diploma, but also if someone is soo smart, why does he need a diploma anyway?)

What I imagine really smart person would do is: go to people giving the course for additional work or talk with them to show where they are at. Skip classes, read something else while in a class. Take advantage of knowledge to not care about the course curriculum and do his own research.

But that is my idea and maybe people who think their time is wasted could be a bit more humble and learn to work with other people.

In principle, yeah. Read something else in class -- better to just skip it then. It is not uncommon for people to skip lectures and just do the exam.

>If those people who do not waste time are so smart why they have to be hold by the hand and given curriculum?

There's a culture of "rules apply to everyone" and people are not used to asking for special treatment. So if you don't make it super obvious, people will assume they can't ask for adjustments. Also, no tuition so weaker incentive to get your money's worth.

You did not get my point, if someone is truly exceptional they skip classes. If otherwise rules apply to everyone keep your head down.

People who think they are exceptional are mostly just casual. (wink wink instagram)

> go to people giving the course for additional work

Always seems to be the solution. It doesn't scale, even if you know how to make a PCB or a cupboard (for example), it doesn't take 0 time. That extra work would be extra time spent, which is nonsense if the goal is to demonstrate competency and reduce wasting time.

Does not scale in what way? Exceptional people are rare, just as I wrote if someone is really exceptional he will blow through all this with no issues and minimal time. There is loads of people who just think are exceptional just like all those people on Instagram.

Does not scale in the way that the day has limited hours, extra work might be okay for a few courses, but not for more because you simply run out of time. There's also the issue that that extra work is given the same grade in the end, but you've spent more time. And no, knowledge doesn't make things take zero time.

Plus, the extra work is still about the same course material - instead of one hello world you write two. It's not hard, it becomes depressing and demoralizing.

In my experience, it's like being sabotaged. If one has a previous interest in the subject but is forced to complete all the same courses it gets very very tedious. Akin to being forced to fill middle school worksheets - you can do it, but it takes time and is just mind-numbing.

I think US universities are forced to cover things again due to a failure in the K-12 system of schooling that precedes it, and the lack of adequate testing to weed out ill prepared individuals.

In many countries, these kids would probably not get into college in the first place due to failing preparatory tests. In the US there are many financial incentives to pull in as many kids as possible and that may cause a lowering of barriers.

An observation in the maths, many countries in Asia cover calculus at the middle school level and continue into high school, in the US I noticed many public schools categorize calculus as an advanced (sometimes elective) high school subject.

The total amount of a study program is limited, if you spend a year on repeating the basic concepts, that's a huge part of your "learning time budget" that you're not not able to devote on learning more advanced topics.

UC Berkeley (where I did my CS degree) follows this model after admission. There's CS61A, an introductory class for people with some math/computers background, and CS3, an introduction for people coming in with no background. Successful and interested CS3 students are then funnelled into CS61A.

Yes but minus the math; what math there was in 61A was easy. 61A didn't really expect much prerequisite either, but then it took off quickly. A lot of work but not intellectually very hard. It was then taught in Scheme which no one knew. Scheme is an elegant language which we never used again. SICP was the course text which no one ever read.

What I really remember was EE40 taking like a week to explain Ohm's Law. I thought, Ok, I think I've got this class. But then it just went exponential and then the prof just dumped a bunch of chapters on us at the end that he didn't cover and said that'll be on the final. EE40 covered about a third of 105. EE40 just had an insane amount of material and labs. FWIW, I think 16A+B covers better material than EE40 did although I have a soft spot in my heart for what was EE20.

BTW, Calculus 1A at Berkeley, if you didn't take AP Calculus in high school, was brutal. Pointlessly so, since most math in non-math courses was pretty straightforward.

But all the freshman courses at Berkeley were hard. You either got up to speed or you got out. Upper division was even harder, but you were prepared by then.

61A was easy in terms of math, but hard in terms of everything else. Every student I met who had never programmed before taking 61A found it intellectually quite challenging, both before and after the switch to Python; even without math, thinking in terms of computation and execution is not natural.

Given that second-hand experience, I found the excision of all of SICP's math from the curriculum to be quite a good choice, as adding advanced math as another prerequisite would have raised the barrier to entry even higher.

(Side note: your description of EE40 sounds like a professor who didn't schedule well, not intentional difficulty.)

(As you know) most of the lower div EECS courses inherit slide decks and the coverage is set by the department. CS70 has a wonderful set of notes which should be a book. I regularly go through the CS61C, CS152 and CS252 decks; those are great Berkeley classes. CS162 has a good set and then Kubi has his which even better. Hilfinger's CS61A notes were quite good. The deck the EE40 prof used was based on a previous semester and it was pretty good. It's just that the class is an insane amount of material and work.

There was an intent behind the work. All of the lower div classes are hard with a massive amount of content. But you can show up a Berkeley from a substandard high school on the wrong side of the tracks and blow it out of the water; a buddy of mine was like that and went to Columbia for his PhD. It's very simple. You just have to work. Immediately. Day one. I don't think Berkeley EECS rewards creativity. Indeed I think EECS punishes creativity. But EECS teaches its students to work their asses off, regardless of whether they came from Lick Wilmerding or Skyline.

Go Bears.

Don't know if the workload was all that hard compared to, say, the experience of my MIT friends, but the level of intellectual rigor and methodical thought was high.

Let's say lowering the bar has the result of making two courses absolutely useless for you, because you've already mastered everything there is to know about them. And let's say your typical bachelor's degree includes 30 or more courses. The time "taken away" from you is around 5%. Time that surely you could spend by studying for the other courses a little bit more diligently, by solving all the optional homework exercises, by going the extra mile for projects.

That said, if after your undergraduate degree you are unsatisfied by the amount of stuff you've learned thus far, there's an easy solution: continue on and pursue a master's degree.

In my case it was first two semesters. Being forced to write what are basically hello worlds what you wrote six years ago was so asinine.

Some universities will let you skip intro courses by passing a test.

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