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Comment by Tunecrew | Hacker News Reader

More persons w/ only Masters but not PhDs should be used to teach the intro classes.

Although I was in EE at Stanford, I took a bunch of CS classes, and hands down Nick Parlante (an instructor, not a professor) was the best actual teacher that I had. CS108 and CS193i

Plus it is possibly that these persons actually make better teachers as opposed to quite a few professors, who are more preoccupied with research, tenure, grad students, etc.

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I hear you. There is a distinctly different skill set between "Pushing the boundary of human knowledge" and "Teaching an intro class well." Universities and tenure have historically been built on this being a high correlation. Reality is that sometimes it happens, sometimes not. Universities need to decouple the teaching from the research. Some of that is leveraging the best pure teachers available.

At my grad school, the joke was that Nobels were more important for admissions than academics.

I agree, this would be an effective and efficient solution. Also I think introductory, and eventually upper year courses could be taught more interactively and autonomously. A human teacher isn't actually required for most material. I think a new paradigm in teaching methods for CS will naturally emerge. I'm thinking of an interactive learning tutorial and practice guide that's comprehensive enough to out perform the best human teachers.

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