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Comment by InkCanon | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

I wouldn’t say linear algebra is a necessity to being a computer scientist. At least, not the full linear algebra content. Knowing matrix math is enough.

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.

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