Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!pasteur!agate!bizet.Berkeley.EDU!matloff
From: matloff@bizet.Berkeley.EDU (Norman Matloff)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: engineering students and verbal skills
Message-ID: <19443@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 25 Jan 89 03:48:31 GMT
References: <19244@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <5618@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <19292@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <5676@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: matloff@iris.ucdavis.edu (Norm Matloff)
Organization: EECS, UC Davis
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In article <5676@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> dykimber@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Daniel Yaron Kimberg) writes:
>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.  

>That's strange.  Could be geography.

Well, it definitely appears to be more difficult than it used to be,
an observation partially confirmed by the fact that a netter read the
above passage and sent me e-mail saying that indeed, his company has
stopped its former practice of hiring summer students.  Maybe it's due
to the fact that a lot of the companies in Silicon Valley are small,
with limited budgets.

>>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

What controls?  In my grad course last quarter, only 1 out of 15 reports
was written clearly.  [In fact, I heaped SO much praise on that one student 
for writing so well, that she must have been a bit puzzled.  :-) ]  Unless
you want to bring in some unlikely theory of sampling bias, e.g. that for
some reason my courses tend to attract poor writers :-) , I would say that
my observations satisfy reasonable statistical criteria.  In my former
(pre-CS) "life," I was a statistician, so I do tend to be careful ....

>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.

Hey, wait a minute, don't make this an Us-vs.-Them thing.  I'm not one
of those guys that says, "In my day, we trudged through 5 feet of snow
to get to school, and we knew how to WRITE!"  [I'm from LA, so I certainly
couldn't talk about the snow stuff. :-) ]  

In fact, if you go back to my original postings, you'll see that I really
was implicitly putting the blame on the FACULTY, for not adequately warning 
the students about the need for good verbal skills.

   Norm