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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

Is the article seriously advocating increasing the number of women in CS by watering down their college courses? An easy "gold" course for the girls, a harder "black" course for boys (and the few girls who would have done CS absent any intervention)?

I also found this very annoying: "I have found an amazing correlation between women with math Ph.D.’s and women whose fathers are mathematicians...you wouldn’t be able to explain the statistics I have."

If you have this data, why not post it? Will mathbabe.org run out of bits?

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No, it's advocating increasing the number of women in CS by proposing a separate 101 course for people (like, the article assumes, most women) with no prior programming experience, while retaining an "introduction" course for those who do have that. I didn't see any implication that higher-level courses should have separate tracks.

The implication seems to be that students with no experience can catch up with experienced students in one semester. Or perhaps that the experienced students have an advantage in perspective but not in actual knowledge, and the perspective can be taught in parallel with the knowledge at little cost.

These implications strike me as implausible. I think it would make more sense to create the for-true-beginners course with the expectation that the regular intro course comes after it.

Indeed, and let's not forget the other half of her point, which was to have introductory level courses focus on solving examples from across science, rather than CS esoterics. From personal experience I agree that if you are trying to get someone interested in a tool, show them what the tool can do before showing them how the tool is made (or how to make their own).

MIT has a class like this as well, 6.00

https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/6/sp12/6.00/index.html

    This subject is aimed at students with little or no programming experience. 
    It aims to provide students with an understanding of the role computation 
    can play in solving problems. It also aims to help students, regardless of 
    their major, to feel justifiably confident of their ability to write small 
    programs that allow them to accomplish useful goals. The class will use the
    Python programming language.

That's because MIT is up-front about expecting their CS freshmen to come in with programming experience.

No, it's advocating not telling people (girls and boys) that there are a few elites who are "good" at math and that the rest of them are doomed. It's not about changing the courses so much. It's about influencing the perception students have of how well they're doing in the class, which affects decisions they make about where to spend their energy.

Totally agree. And it isn't amazing at all that higher education parents breed higher education children.

I went to high school a town over from Lexington (Wellesley) and I will say everyone's parents are hi-end professionals or Ph.D.'s (actually It was a culture shock for me caused moved from Maine to MA when I started high school). High expectations bring high results.

> Is the article seriously advocating increasing the number of women in CS by watering down their college courses?

Yes, but not by this particular change. Black isn't harder, it just covers more fun side topics, by skipping some intro material. This is better for everyone--more prepared students don't get bored, less prepared students don't get intimidated.

Mudd's general new philosophy of acquiring female students at any cost, however...that's another thing. Not to mention people who should know better subsidizing "research" positions for freshman women to build glorified websites.

It is obviously not proposing 'watering down' anything. All it recommends is a recognition that people come to college with very different degrees of experience and that it can be intimidating and offputting to the less experienced. As there is a gender difference operating here best recognize it and address it at the curriculum level.

As there is a gender difference operating here...

If the set of less qualified people did not display a gender difference, would it be acceptable to let the weaker ones fail/quit/be intimidated?

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