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From: spaf@cs.purdue.EDU (Gene Spafford)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: ACM Programming Contest
Message-ID: <13906@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>
Date: 15 Mar 91 23:59:01 GMT
Sender: news@cs.purdue.EDU
Distribution: comp
Organization: Department of Computer Science, Purdue University
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Many good schools were not represented in the programming contest.
That doesn't necessarily mean anything.  Some schools can't get enough
interest by qualified people to put a team together and go through the
various steps of competition.  Others get eliminated in the regionals.

The team that wins the Programming contest has done something
significant, but it isn't clear exactly what.  The contests are graded
on speed and accuracy over a limited test set.  No grades are given
for design, reuse, maintainability, security, safety, style,
scalability, efficiency, or any of the other properties we generally
seek to teach in a rigorous curriculum.  Neither are they problems of
substantial size or scope.

Thus, we have a contest that tests a very narrow range of skills by a
small groups of students.  It is clearly not representative of the
school in general, for good or bad. (Some people view success in the
programming contest as an indication that the school emphasizes the
wrong skills>)   Still, that isn't to take away from the effort and
talent that is displayed.  The students work hard, and should be proud
of what they accomplished.  It's just that no one should try to
generalize those results to anything else.
-- 
Gene Spafford
NSF/Purdue/U of Florida  Software Engineering Research Center,
Dept. of Computer Sciences, Purdue University, W. Lafayette IN 47907-2004
Internet:  spaf@cs.purdue.edu	phone:  (317) 494-7825