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From: crm@duke.UUCP (Charlie Martin)
Newsgroups: net.cse
Subject: Re: Exams vs. Programming Assignments
Message-ID: <6416@duke.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 4-Oct-85 12:48:07 EDT
Article-I.D.: duke.6416
Posted: Fri Oct  4 12:48:07 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 7-Oct-85 03:18:46 EDT
References: <823@dataio.Dataio.UUCP> <6358@duke.UUCP> <10497@ucbvax.ARPA> <6379@duke.UUCP> <10524@ucbvax.ARPA>
Reply-To: crm@duke.UUCP (Charlie Martin)
Organization: Duke University
Lines: 43
Summary: 

In article <10524@ucbvax.ARPA> tedrick@ucbernie.UUCP (Tom Tedrick) writes:
>>   I'll stick with my analogy, thanks: [ ... much deleted ... ] 
>>			Charlie Martin
>....
>I think though that there is a real problem with undergrads who
>catch on to programming as if they were born to it, then decide 
>that they know everything there is to know about Computer Science.
You are absolutely right, of course.  I know this because I was one
of these students, left school, went off and made lots of nice
money (salary lots, not Steve Jobs lots), and am now back in school
years later trying to learn all that theory stuff.

>Computer Science has a marvelously rich theory and I wish more
>of the undergrads could appreciate it. (Also the formal legal
>purpose of this University (Berkeley) is to train scientists
>and researchers, and promote scientific research, not to
>provide job training for programmers.)
I wish more undergrads could appreciate it as well -- and sometimes
despair of trying to suggest it to *my* undergrads.  As to the formal
legal purpose ... well, I used to see a lot of people from Berkeley,
and the ones we hired with master's degrees did lots of programming.
They also wrote lots and lots of English prose, which will only
set me off on another rant-and-rave if I think about it.  (We don't
usually teach CS majors about literate english either.)  Until we
have a bigger market for people who spend a lot of time showing
whether an algorithm is O(n**2.1) or (On**2.15), wouldn't we be
better off by calling a spade a spade?

(As an aside: I think the top-20 schools all tend to emphasize real
programming and/or hacking.  This seems an interesting regularity.)

(Another aside: Please don't take the comment above as a criticism of
Cal -- we saw lots of CAl people because they seemed to have learned
marked more of the sort of thing I'm talking about.)

That's my only complaint here anyway: we worry about teaching them the
theory, and how we should be exposing them to more of the theory, but
still don't really teach them how to express those ideas in a useful
form.  I still think that is (essentially) a cheat.
-- 

			Charlie Martin
			(...mcnc!duke!crm)