Here's a response to several posts (linked) about Purdue CS from "I'm a 10!":
Non-CS CS students
I'm sure the statistics agree that the percentage of students that enter without any computer science background and stay is much lower than the percentage of students that enter with prior experience. I would also argue, however, that part of it is because those students enter CS without knowing what they really want. I've used this argument a lot, and it might not be true [anymore], but I think a lot of students come into our department because they think they're good with computers; this is patently incorrect reasoning. I think for people interested in CS, they should try to get into programming before they leave high school to see if it's really for them. Of course, sometimes it's formally impossible to do so.
While I'm one of the fortunate that had AP Computer Science offered at their high school, not everyone does. One of our CS180 lab instructors came to Purdue with no formal experience, because his school didn't offer it. This is a commonly cited reason for not having experience, but I don't think I buy this as an excuse. In most situations, I find it hard to believe that a high school student doesn't have the time for some self-teaching; I also believe that if a student is unable to teach him or herself, it might be a sign; after all, software engineering is hard. This is not to say that it's impossible, or that people with no experience entering CS at Purdue will fail, as a counter-example is provided above, but I don't think it's making it easier on anyone. To me, computer science is one of the few areas where you can get some real, practical knowledge before entering college. I'm fairly ignorant about other fields, so it could be one of many.
Of course, to shift all of the blame onto the students is probably biased elitism. I think the curriculum could use an overhaul, but such a task is time-consuming, bureaucratic, and not likely to happen. There are a lot of issues at hand, and I daresay that it's impossible to solve them all. Primarily, not all professors that teach classes want to be there. From what I understand, all professors are supposed to teach at least one class a semester, but not all professors are interested in teaching, much less teaching undergrads. The same goes for TAs; I've heard of a number of graduate TAs that don't seem to put much effort into their teaching, or their knowledge of the subject is restricted to an inapplicable domain, or some other random problem. Is it impossible to find grad students that care and actually know something? I don't think so. I've come across several good TAs over the years; perhaps they're just a minority. In all reality, this applies to undergrad TAs as well. I've seen some TAs who either don't care, don't actually know enough to be very good TAs, or just think that students that ask questions are dumb. Since I think I'm taking over as lab admin next semester, I sure hope I get a say in who will be on my lab staff.
Course syllabi also vary significantly from professor to professor. While I understand that professors have different teaching styles, I don't think it's a very good idea to have such a significant difference. For example, I took CS251, our data structures class, in the fall, which is off-semester. The class was a piece of cake and I hardly had to study for it. The kids who took it in the spring had incredible amounts of work, including building a web server using certain data structures, etc. While I think it's cool to work on practical projects like that, I think it's unfair to the students who have to do significantly more work for less return. The objective of the course should be learning about data structures, their run times, and how to implement them. All of the extra stuff is nice for the very advanced students, but adds incredible stress to everyone else.
Administration
I can't really comment much on this, since I'm not in the USB and have zero interaction with higher administration, but I'm guessing it's related to my statements above, since the higher administration are a subset of the faculty. I have no idea what caused a strained relationship between the administration and the USB, but I really fail to see why bygones can't be bygones. It seems that both the students and the faculty know what's best for the students, which just causes a deadlock in improving our CS curriculum.
The new building
To some degree, I agree that the new building has had a negative impact on the little sociality that our CS department had. I think the lack of a new undergrad lounge is kind moot point, since it's [kind of] migrated to the small area outside of the advisors' offices as well as the computer labs, where a lot of people seem to do work. I'm pretty sure the administration knew that the commons wouldn't be occupied by many CS majors, but I guess they didn't have much else to do with that space besides make it look pretty. Besides, the commons brings girls into our building, what can be so bad about that?!
My real issue with the new building is the bureaucracy that's been added to the advisors' offices. There's a secretary outside of that block now, and we have to sign in and out and set up appointments to meet our advisors; I would label this as being very close to the pinnacle of ridiculous. I don't think the advisors have ever had any trouble doing all of the work they needed with an open-door policy (which closes when stress levels rise), so who thought it would be a good idea to formalize social interaction with our advisors? I used to visit my advisor very frequently, and now it's reduced to one visit every few months; usually it's just to schedule my next semester. This sort of alienation between the students and the advisors is the last thing the department needs.
Apathy and entitlement
Apathy, as partly mentioned above, is a big kicker for the students and faculty. The faculty might not care, but the students often don't have more motivation than to complain on a newsgroup or to their own peers. The CS feedback panel hosted by the USB on a yearly basis shows little attendance from students that have issues with the way things are done, and sometimes the ones that do show up have very little constructive feedback to give. Even if there was a larger attendance and more feedback, does the faculty even care? Does anyone read their course feedback? I've read mine from teaching a CS158 (C for engineers) lab as well as for MA366 (ODE), but I've never really seen any active caring in CS180 about what sort of feedback TAs get. Is it like this for all classes/professors? No, but probably a majority.
My own conclusions
Despite all of this prose that looks like a bucket full of complaining, I'm actually not as dissatisified with CS as I seem. I've passed all of my classes and have started learning new stuff lately, which is good. Education and how to better teach in a CS180 lab are specific areas that I'm interested in, as a TA. I feel like it's my duty to try and reduce the number of people that drop out of CS because of CS180, but what's the use if they just drop out when they get to CS240?
I've jumped to conclusions before, but I wonder if other universities have these problems. It seems like a university with a CS department that genuinely cares about its undergrads would be a utopian department. Unfortunately, I don't think these universities exist.
5 comments:
I know exactly what you mean by helping people pass a class. I feel that helping people in 240 is an obligation and I think it's a good thing helping people learn. But sometimes I feel like I'm just dragging people across the finish line. For example, for our latest project I think I've helped 3-4 people from start to finish for the most part, and for most of the time I feel like I'm just doing the project for them, and it may be helping their grade for the moment, but it's not helping them learn how to program.
Also, I've been rather frustrated by the question of what usb actually does. What do they do? I sent them a message on their site last weekend but haven't got any response yet. Right now my _impression_ of USB is that it is an hierarchal exclusive do nothing organization. Well, on second thought, they do plan events, but their purpose (supposedly) is to increase communication between students and the administration, and I'm just not seeing them do that.
I think people are the number one reason why I almost never work in computer labs for projects (laziness coming in a close second, compilers being the only exception). I don't go explicitly because I don't want people to start asking me questions that will end up making me explain the entire project to them; instead, I stick to helping people that post on the newsgroups. Unfortunately, some people never learn how to post on the newsgroups; those people are just dead to me. They tell you on day 1 to learn it.
CS sucks at Purdue, because many of the teachers at Purdue suck, such as Suresh Jagannathan. Who tests your knowledge of unpractical code, such as char *ptr = &"hello"[2];. Which I get, but please test our knowledge instead of trying to stump us. Many of the teachers at this school seem to put more effort into trying to stump us, instead of trying to teach us.
You must be in CS240. I'm sorry, but I have little sympathy for your cause. If you can't figure out what that piece of code does, you are going to have many more problems down the road. While I agree that playing mind games with operator precedence is annoying, this is not at all a complicated statement. Also, it's not at all "unpractical". I've seen more or less that exact statement several times before (except using a char * variable instead of "hello").
Suresh has never taught at the freshman level before, so that is part of the problem. I have had Suresh guest lecture for my classes several times at the upper level and he is quite good.
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