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Comment by calvinmorrison | Hacker News Reader

I tried to place out of an intro-to-programming course in a back-to-school bout of scholastic achievement. I wasn't allowed to test out of it despite the coursewor being rote and that anyone with 2 seconds looking at my CV could see I did not need it. Anyway - they released the assignments on day 1. I turned them in on day 2. I still had to go to class. Stupid.

My "filesystems and database design" class was basically howto use mysql. It's a shame, I was more interested in actual file system and database design

Just stupid stuff like that made me drop the academic bullshit and skip into the real world.

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It’s hard to say with this little information, but it sounds like you might have chosen the wrong school for your goals?

The database class at my uni was mostly relational algebra. Likewise, many other classes were mostly foundational theory (though we did have project-based applicative classes too).

It was the closest reasonably priced state school near to my home thst took transfer credits from my community College. I should have gone for copywriting

The final nail in the coffin was me failing calc 3 twice so I don't think they were unacademic

> The final nail in the coffin was me failing calc 3 twice so I don't think they were unacademic

This failure also may be a sign that it was the wrong school. A course taught badly or indifferently can make a subject tedious or difficult, that when taught well is exciting and easy.

I loved my math prof, I just suck at math. I took him twice.

I took a database design class in college. I had been using MySQL for years at this point (by no means an expert, but databases weren’t foreign to me).

In my first exam I got a 90/100. I got all the queries right (don’t get me started on programming/writing queries on paper and how stupid that is), but I lost 1 point on each of the 10 questions. Why? Because I didn’t put a semicolon at the end of my query. Something I had never done in any database tool, never done in my code, and only done 1-2 times on the CLI if that.

IMHO computer science in college is a joke at most places. Teaching things 10+ years out of date by people who have a chip on this shoulder towards anything new. I had an EE professor who literally did not go a single class without find some way to denigrate web developers and “not real developers”. Fun times.

It's been a while since I've touched SQP, and most of my experience is with psql, but as far as I can recall if you type commands into the psql console without a semicolon the commands don't get executed properly?

Still a dumb reason to deduct points though

You are correct, on the command line you need it but pretty much every GUI tool and language binding auto-add it for you. It felt very nit-picky and not at all based in reality. I got all the joins/limits/order/where/etc correct, the semicolon doesn’t matter for what I felt the test should be actually testing on. Testing human’s ability to memorize or write perfect syntax when they will never do that unaided in reality is just silly.

> IMHO computer science in college is a joke at most places.

I hate to agree, but yeah.

I'm watching my husband go through a CS degree course right now, and the stuff he talks about I'm just like "why are they focusing on this, you literally never use this."

His "computer graphics" class was all about using the original GLUT library. The school specifically highlighted M1 Macs as good computers for their CS department students to use. Think about this combo for about 5s.

Yeah, the lib wasn't available in arm format...

The incompatible library and overly expensive computer recommendations aside, CS is full of things "you literally never use". It's a theoretical discipline more akin to mathematics than anything else, and it certainly isn't software engineering, to the surprise of many students (including me, when I was one).

Outside of my university coursework, I have never used the Pumping Lemma (Theory of Computation), balanced a red-black tree (Algorithms & Data Structures), relational algebra (Databases), and all sorts of other things that someone focused on the software development aspect of computers would literally never use and would wonder why we're focusing so much on these things.

One of my professors would mark us down for each line of code that is over 80 characters.

What it really was was a forcing function to figure out auto formatting tools, so in the end I didn't mind.

Stuff like this makes me angry. I had similar experiences in uni.

I grew up very poor, so finishing uni was like, an achievement I had to do, but I learnt C++ and HL2 modding and other computer stuff back in highschool.

My uni experience was 7 years of hell (multiple gap years to go do real work before coming back). Getting stuff like "pseudocode can't have an equal sign in it, so NC" on assignments.

"Even if you finish all the assignments you must attend every tutorial or you pass"

Ive told many academics to go to hell. I'm not paid to be there like they are.

My grades go from "barely passed" to "high distinction" like a rollercoaster each year.

- and yet, I still really wanted to like uni. I do still want to like it, it's just a shame about the academics

When I had BS classes that required attendance, I'd just sit reading a book. Teacher doesn't respect me, I don't respect them. Screw em.

Completing university is the most useless project I've worked on.

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