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Comment by jychang | Hacker News Reader

This is talking about CS10, not CS61a.

CS10 is a class designed mostly for non majors, who are interested in Computer Science; CS61a is the first required class for the major. I know of a bunch of CS guys with their girlfriends in CS10. A lot of people who are already set on taking CS as their major go directly into CS61a, skipping CS10, and this accounts for a lot of the gender ratio difference in CS10. If you look at a class like CS162, you can see the gender ratio of the people who are actually sticking through the major.

This doesn't mean as much as graduation rates, etc.

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That's what I was thinking. I remember CS101 at my school had a decent amount of women, but by the time you reached 3rd year they all had disappeared.

At our school, by the time you reached 2nd year most everyone disappeared, male and female. Fall semester sophomore year was about 25% of fall semester freshmen.

As it turns out, making video games has little to do with playing them.

Haha right. Almost everyone flushed out in CS1.

"I want to make games!" to "This shit is hard, I'm gonna get a business degree."

As it happens when you have projects that take about 4x (or more) the amount of time as your friends majors that takes a toll. People would rather be partying than writing code. Maybe our CS1 was a bit too hard (we've had many discussions with the profs about this and the attrition rate and what to do about it), but everyone who finished freshmen year graduated in our class. It prepared us well, but it was too hard for most.

Yeah I think that seems to be a pretty common scenario. It's pretty unfortunate that there are people who only think of programming in relation to game development rather than the rest of the spectrum.

However, if you both want to make games, and have the stuff to actually make it through a CS degree program, hearing this shit gets a little old.

Back in college, I had a roommate who was a recently-graduated electrical engineer (I, at the time, was a rising sophomore). We had a chat about dating in electrical engineering.

"Angersock," he said," do you know how many women there were in my first year?"

I thought for a second. "I don't know, maybe 20 or 30?".

"About half my class of around 80 or so. Do you know how many I graduated with?"

"Erm, 10 or 15?"

"Try 3. Does the phrase 'hunted to extinction' mean anything to you?"

Not the best metaphor, dude ...

This is the case at my uni. I'm currently a senior and my first intro java class was around 1/5th females. There are now 2-3 in any upper-level class.

A few years back, the optional intro course was CS3 (though I don't think it was meant for non-majors). Has CS10 just replaced CS3, or does CS3 still exist and CS10 is something separate?

EDIT: Never mind, I looked it up, which I should have done in the first place. CS3 is the optional intro CS/programming class ("Intro to Symbolic Programming"), and CS10 is "The Beauty and Joy of Computing", which seems designed for non-majors getting an introduction to "the history, social implications, great principles, and future of computing", with a gentle introduction to programming in a graphical language.

I guess that makes the article substantially less significant/interesting.

CS3 isn't offered anymore. CS10 is the replacement, but it also goes for broader appeal than just being prep for 61a.

It looks CS3 is still in the course catalog (http://general-catalog.berkeley.edu/catalog/gcc_list_crse_re...)

Whoops never mind, I just saw the response to my other comment saying that the course catalog is out of date. Never mind then.

True, except this is an indicator that efforts to increase interest in computer science among young females appears to be making inroads. This should embolden those groups working to introduce computer science to young females.

So it's probably a good sign in general, but not a sign that the major is changing yet.

At my university I would guess that it was about a quarter women. They were evenly distributed amongst the caliber of grads. Of the top 8 or so in my class (smaller program) 2 were women.

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