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Comment by hbn | Hacker News Reader

The University I went to has like an 80% acceptance rate so it's not comparable, but I was surprised when I got into 400-level CS classes and there were people who didn't know how to program at all.

Our professor assigned us to write a fast fourier transform, and when we had class next week apparently everyone claimed that it was too difficult so he changed the assignment to "find an implementation online and write about it"

I feel really grateful I graduated before the advent of LLMs because it was really easy to stand out as a good student when the standards are apparently so low.

Side tangent but in the same class he caught people zero-citation copy-pasting from Wikipedia on the papers we were assigned to write, and the guys acted like they had no idea you couldn't do that.

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I went to a state school. The quality varied wildly depending on the department. It was very eye opening in the general English/writing classes when encountering people who couldn't read or write above a 4th grade level. The difference between they're, their, and there was like a riddle to some of them. Of course many didn't make it more than a semester or two.

That's the big thing - the college might be dropping the first semester grades so they can squeeze a second semester of tuition out of kids.

> The quality varied wildly depending on the department.

I feel like it has always been this way. I went to a small private university. The natural sciences and especially the pre-med students had their days fully packed, like the only time you could even have a moment to talk about anything was at the cafeteria during meals.

Then there was the business department. The college athletes apparently picked business as a major because you have to pick something. You couldn't guess what was their preferred minor and why... The overwhelming preferred minor was music because the buildings for department of business and music were adjacent.

Compare that to the pre meds who were always worried about getting a B and somehow "ruining their chances at med school".

> The college athletes apparently picked business as a major because you have to pick something.

I actually think it makes a lot of sense to go for some kind of basic business degree if you're angling to go into professional sports. Having some basic concepts of basic business law, finance, etc. seems pretty important for someone looking to shop their abilities and likeness around and have some understanding of the contract negotiations they'll hopefully be a part of. Outside of the gym its probably the most relevant kind of skills being taught on a college campus for that career path.

I feel like the prevailing story you would hear “back in the day” was always the star quarterback or the kid of a rich donor getting white-glove treatment. Instead my experience matched GP, handful of students complaining that a tree-balancing exercise is “too harsh” and getting the entire assignment slashed by the professor being pressed to increase the size of the department.

I must be old (I am) because I have never seen a professor change an assignment based on student feedback on how hard the assignment was.

I guess this sort of thing explains the drastic dip in quality in the jr engineers lately that I noticed.

As an instructor, what do you do if 1/2 of the class lacks the pre-requisites for the material.

'give them an F' sounds good. But that impacts a lot of people.

What you need to do is move the material down a bit. Within reason.

> ... squeeze a second semester of tuition out of kids.

Propitiated, in many cases, by the unnoticed run-up of their student loan debt balance.

> That's the big thing - the college might be dropping the first semester grades so they can squeeze a second semester of tuition out of kids.

This seems most likely. If you think of college as yet another extractive business (and you can bet the administrators at colleges think this way), then students that drop out are simply cu$tomers you are failing to retain: Pure lost revenue.

In almost any program, it is entirely possible to navigate your degree so that you are allowed to come away with a high GPA but knowing largely nothing useful. There's enough burned out adjuncts, overworked pre-tenure profs, and coasting/research-oriented tenured profs that with some help from upperclassmen and the ability to detect lax professors, that you can manage to get through largely unscathed by learning. Typically to your chagrin/despair as you then begin interviewing.

I went to a 2nd tier state school in the early mid 2000s.

For our senior project class, one group of students successfully incorporated as a startup and sold their project to the city as a SaSS app, and my group ended up open sourcing our cross platform app.

Everyone in the program could code - really well - by the time they got to their junior year. Those who couldn't were weeded out early on.

May have helped they the entire first 2 years were taught in native languages with manual memory management.

I started university in 2014 so it was post-Google-driving-up-engineer-salaries, and it attracted a LOT of people with no passion for computers, but wanted one of those well-paying jobs.

It was rare to find people who actually "got" computers, and learned things beyond what was taught in classes cause they just liked technology. Those of us who just really liked tinkering with our computers knew who the other ones like us were. And it still feels like that after working as a professional in the industry for the better part of a decade.

I'm pretty sure most of the people I work with have no idea what a .zshrc file is, or how to configure things to optimize their workflow, or use keyboard shortcuts, etc.

My program failed those people out hard and early.

Two of the freshman classes were weed out classes and they did their job well.

What is a 400-level CS class mean in this context? The numbering systems at universities are very different. I'm assuming that's grad school

> Our professor assigned us to write a fast fourier transform, and when we had class next week apparently everyone claimed that it was too difficult so he changed the assignment to "find an implementation online and write about it"

that sounds unbelievable. Not calling you out by any means i'm just shocked! I can comprehend tuning down the difficulty but not to the level of find some code online and write about it.

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