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From: matloff@bizet.Berkeley.EDU (Norman Matloff)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: engineering students and verbal skills
Message-ID: <19292@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 21 Jan 89 02:52:46 GMT
References: <19244@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <5618@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: matloff@iris.ucdavis.edu (Norm Matloff)
Organization: EECS, UC Davis
Lines: 37

In article <5618@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> dykimber@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Daniel Yaron Kimberg) writes:
>In article <19244@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> matloff@iris.ucdavis.edu (Norm Matloff) writes:

>Right, I actually meant students who'd held full time summer jobs in which
>they had to do things like give presentations, document their code, write
>grant proposals, etc. (depending on the job)  I think that this covers a
>pretty respectable percentage of college students, and I don't think these
>people would be ignorant of the environment in which they had worked.

That's a very interesting thing to say.  My undergrad students complain
that they can't find summer jobs in CS, in spite of the proximity of the 
Silicon Valley.  Only a few seem to manage.  

But of those that do, they certainly have had their eyes opened, as you said.

>Right, well perhaps the point I intended was that anecdotal evidence is
>the worst sort of way to support an argument like this.  Every student I
>know is at least literate enough to function in the workplace, if not to
>pen the next Anna Karenina.

The students can generally write grammatically and with a reasonably
small number of misspellings.  But what they write is NOT clear.
This is not anecdotal evidence; it is what I observe constantly, in
my students, in the people I worked with when I was in industry, in
the computer manuals I read, in the research papers which are sent to
me for review, etc.  It is a serious problem.

>forced to prove 100%.  But since this runs contrary to my observations,

Maybe in the rarified air of Princeton, engineering students are true
scholars, putting as much emphasis on their nonengineering courses as
on the engineering stuff.  But we're fairly selective here too  --  an
applicant has to have nearly a straight-A average to get into EE here  --
and yet this is not what I see.  [Of course, this invites some "California
jokes," which is fine with me ...  :-)  ]

   Norm