Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ncis.llnl.gov!helios.ee.lbl.gov!nosc!ucsd!rutgers!njin!princeton!phoenix!dykimber
From: dykimber@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Daniel Yaron Kimberg)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: engineering students and verbal skills
Message-ID: <5676@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 21 Jan 89 06:05:30 GMT
References: <19244@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <5618@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <19292@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Reply-To: dykimber@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Daniel Yaron Kimberg)
Organization: Princeton University, NJ
Lines: 45

In article <19292@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> matloff@iris.ucdavis.edu (Norm Matloff) writes:
[cites my saying that a respectable %age of undergrads get real summer jobs]
>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.

That's strange.  Could be geography.

>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.

Well, I meant anecdotal in the sense that you aren't enforcing experimental
controls, not in that you don't have sufficient basis for your claim.  I
don't doubt that it's a serious problem, but I still maintain that the
higher salience of the negative examples makes the problem seem more serious
than it is.  I know I could name ten examples of poor teaching I've received
at princeton off the top of my head, and it would take a while to come up
with ten examples of good teaching.  But I don't think this is a good basis
for criticizing the teaching here.

>>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 ...  :-)  ]

Hey, I never said princeton was any different from anyplace else.  But
you made a statement about students which I thought ran contrary to my
observations [i.e. that students were largely unaware of the literacy
problem].  Now I admit I'm biased because I'm a student, and I take any
general statement about students, whether or not it applies to me,
personally.  But I was hoping to point out that in your position, there's
a bias too [and now we're moving more towards the question of literacy
and away from the question of awareness], towards the negative position.

                                                  -Dan