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From: thomas@utah-gr.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.cse
Subject: Re: CS vs. CE
Message-ID: <1799@utah-gr.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 13-Sep-86 11:37:44 EDT
Article-I.D.: utah-gr.1799
Posted: Sat Sep 13 11:37:44 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 27-Sep-86 23:51:05 EDT
References: <13500008@uiucdcsb> <65@alberta.UUCP> <66@alberta.UUCP>
Reply-To: thomas@utah-gr.UUCP (Spencer W. Thomas)
Organization: University of Utah CS Dept
Lines: 64


Well, reading all these articles makes me feel pretty good about our
curriculum.  We recently redesigned our 10-year old curriculum to bring
it up to date, and to make it more rigorous.  In the freshman year,
students are busy taking general engineering prerequisites (we are in
the Engineering College, so this is required) such as calculus, physics,
etc.  They must also take a Pascal programming course (we expect this to
phase out as more students come from high school with programming
experience) and an "Introduction to CS" course.  This course gives an
overview of CS hardware and software techniques, but is not primarily a
programming course (it has programming labs, though).  The last couple
of years, we have used Lisp as the language base for this course (using
the Abelman and Sussman book).

After this first "year" (may take longer for some students), students
are admitted to the CS program (by GPA, unfortunately, this is a
University mandated cutoff rule, to try to avoid discrimination cases).
The second year really gets into the nitty-gritty.  All second-year
students take two thre-quarter sequences, one in hardware and one in
software.  The hardware sequence covers topics from general digital
logic design to microcomputer assembly programming.  In the lab, the
students must build and test a number of complex circuits.  The software
sequence covers algorithms & data structures, programming linguistics
(the "how" of a computer language, covering, for example, the actions
taken by a language interpreter or the code generation phase of a
compiler), syntax analysis (the other half of compilation), "software
engineering," and other topics.  They must also take a one-quarter
course on "discrete mathematics", covering set theory, Boolean algebra,
Markov processes and other (un)related topics.

If they make it through this greuling process, they are then
full-fledged computer science majors (there is a second cut point for
those who are just not suited to the life).  They are then required to
take, in the next two years, 4 "core" courses: 
	Theoretical CS
	Operating Systems
	Data Communication
	Compiler Construction
The question as to whether these courses are really "core" of CS can be
directed elsewhere; these are areas in which we have had strengths, or
which we perceived to by important in and of themselves.  There is, for
example, no "Data Bases" course in this list (although I have heard
arguments that data bases and operating systems share many topics in
common (allocation of resources, scheduling of transactions, etc.) so
that one might consider offering a course in "OS & DB", strange as it
seems. But this wouldn't fit well into 1 quarter, that's for sure.)

They must also take 5 electives, of which up to 3 may be in one area
(e.g., a 3-quarter computer graphics, AI, robotics, or VLSI sequence),
and a "senior lab", which is a 3-quarter lab course in either hardware
or software, in which the students are required to design, implement,
test, and document a major project.

In addition to all this, they must complete all the university
graduation requirements, several Math courses (numerical analysis,
probability & statistics), some more physics, a technical writing
course, and maybe some others I've forgotten.

All in all, I think it's a pretty good curriculum (not up to, say, MIT
standards, but what do you want?) and one that should turn out computer
scientists knowledgable in a broad spectrum of topics in CS.

-- 
=Spencer   ({ihnp4,decvax}!utah-cs!thomas, thomas@utah-cs.ARPA)