9 ms·

How Harvey Mudd College increased the ratio of women in CS

56 points by steven 11y ago

deleted 11y ago
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fiatmoney 11y ago
Why is shifting people from one major into another on face desirable? We should be glad there are less, eg, female biology majors and future doctors?
- raldi 11y ago
  If a young woman has equal potential as a future doctor or computer scientist, then sure, it's zero-sum whether she picks one versus the other. The problem is, there are undoubtedly a large number of young women out there who have the potential to become great programmers and love their careers, but for whatever reason, they're ending up becoming average doctors instead and feeling just so-so about their career choice. In the latter case, it's better for both the women in question, and society in general, to support their becoming computer scientists.
  - _dark_matter_ 11y ago
    Or, more likely, they might finish their degree but not do well enough to go to Med School anyways, resulting in a different career path altogether.
  - saulrh 11y ago
    My SO is one of the women who are better off because they got through a CS degree instead of an alternate. She could have been a good molecular biologist or teacher, but she's a spectacular software engineer, especially for those high-level business-use/architectural tasks that a lot of devs can't handle. She'd be a lot less happy right now if her dad had managed to succeed in convincing her that girls can't program.
- tbabb 11y ago
  The overwhelming skew in the CS population suggests that women either believe CS is not accessible to them (which isn't-- or should not be-- true), or that the community is unwelcoming to them (which is a problem in of itself and should be corrected, and means that motivated women are turning away from a field that would otherwise excite them). The skew is indicative of a problem. We should fix it.
  - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
    Isn't it possible for the skew to also represent that it just isn't appealing (for example it may not be appealing due to socially conditioned gender roles)?
    - tbabb 11y ago
      We won't know if that's the case until we fix the glaring, skew-causing problems that are already there.
  - sheepmullet 11y ago
    > The overwhelming skew in the CS population suggests that women either believe CS is not accessible to them It isn't for many of them. Not really. Not as a great career. I'm on ~$160k total comp as a senior software dev working full time. I want to move to a part time 20-25 hours and yet nobody wants to hire me for $80k/year part time.
- daveguy 11y ago
  You should read the article. What they did wasn't about shifting people from different majors on gender. It was about making CS more accessible in general. It probably increased their CS enrollment (and retainment) significantly. Some things they did: 1) separate experienced from inexperienced programmers in intro classes minimizing intimidation effects where it feels like you are behind from the start. 2) early research programs. Get students involved in applications of CS rather than just theory and fundamental programming for 2 years. 3) "share what works" and "demystify success" are communication with other colleges and moocs about what works in teaching cs along with giving more clear guidelines of what successful performance looks like. So. These have the added benefit of improving the gender gap, but really these are items that will help EVERY CS student. I don't think they corrected for impact of girls who code movements and increased encouragement in HS (eg increase if they had done nothing), but then it isn't a scientific study just a case study.
- cortesoft 11y ago
  Well, this article is written from the perspective of the CS field. The CS field wants more diversity, for many reasons (better pool of candidates, more diverse field, etc). Any field that has a very skewed demographic would probably have similar outreach initiatives to draw in the under-represented group.
fhood 11y ago
I think that splitting intro classes by experience is really important. In intro classes a lot of the more experienced (and thus less socially able) students are actively intimidating. I was helping out with a 100 level project and on the class forum people were "helping" by suggesting the use of regex and bit shifting. Intro students don't have to know about that yet, but seeing it in those settings makes them feel like they are behind everyone else.
- alex_g 11y ago
  at my school, most students take as their first CS course, a 123 course focused on a specific topic (app dev, robotics, computer graphics). No prior experience is required and apparently it has really improved on the number of students who drop out of the CS department after starting out with intro courses without seeing any real applications.
- seizethecheese 11y ago
  > In intro classes a lot of the more experienced (and thus less socially able) students are actively intimidating. I think the developer community should try to not perpetuate the stereotype that those with experience programming necessarily don't have social skills. This type of thing is what pigeonholes us as "nerds" who are incapable of being involved in the business side of projects.
  - wskinner 11y ago
    Not sure why this is getting downvoted. I would add that in my own experience (took CS61a at Berkeley with no prior programming and little math) those guys who already had a lot of knowledge were inspiring and a great asset. Working with more knowledgable people is a fundamental feature of industry and academia, and if you view it from the right perspective, it doesn't have to be intimidating.
- serge2k 11y ago
  Why the hell would they be less socially able? Oh I took an intro to programming class in high school, liked it, and learned a bit more on my own. Guess I'm a social idiot now. Quit perpetuating negative stereotypes.
caseysoftware 11y ago
I serve on the CS advisory board at another college that competes head to head with Harvey Mudd for students. Generally, when one of these schools celebrates having more women or a higher ratio than the others, it means they've managed to recruit more of a static pool rather than growing the pool. The college that I advise at took another approach to grow the pool while also recruiting better from the pool. They encourage profs to work with Girl Scout troops on science projects, to get students to tutor junior high and high school kids in general, and build relationships long before the normal "I have to think about college" thoughts begin.
- up_and_up 11y ago
  > build relationships long before the normal "I have to think about college" thoughts begin That seems crazy that `colleges` are engaging in such a long sale cycle.
  - pm90 11y ago
    It seems more like they are interested in getting kids to understand technology. If that was somehow coercive, then yes. But this sounds more like a bunch of people demoing stuff and letting kids check it out.
- phasmantistes 11y ago
  Yep, and Mudd actually does this as well. The example that comes to mind is that a bunch of students work with local FIRST Robotics and LEGO Robotics teams, including teams consisting entirely of women or of minorities.
- jacobush 11y ago
  It's not like recruiting more from a static pool is a bad thing either. But it's commendable your place is actually trying to grow the pool, I have a feeling you should start 10 years earlier. Help children feel CS is a natural place for women to be, you'll be getting somewhere. This sounds like the correct approach.
  - 11y ago
gwern 11y ago
This has been discussed in the past on HN (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=harvey%20mudd&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=harvey%20mudd&sort=byPopularit...). The real howto is simple: take a tiny elite college; spend a staggering amount of money poaching the few women interested in CS to your college and loosening admission rates; proceed to talk only about percentages when boasting about your success.
- phasmantistes 11y ago
  First, you present this statement as though all the other conversations on HN about Harvey Mudd have come to the same conclusion. This is demonstrably not true. Second, I'd like to encourage you to not describe recruiting and admitting women as "lossening admission rates". That's the kind underhanded, unconscious sexism that we're trying to avoid here. Even if I accept as true that a higher percentage of men are qualified to be admitted to HMC's CS program (which I don't, but for the sake of argument...) the absolute number of people -- men, women, and otherwise -- who qualify is so much larger than what HMC can support that it could admit a class of 0 men and not have to worry about "lowering its standards". It sounds like you've lost sight of the forest for the trees. Sure, a larger school might be able to have a larger impact. Sure, maybe Mudd isn't doing as much as it could, or is spending more money than it should. But it is still doing something demonstrably effective, which is more than most places can say.
  - forgetsusername 11y ago
    >That's the kind underhanded, unconscious sexism that we're trying to avoid here I'm interested in facts, not political correctness. Were admission rates loosened to accomplish the goals, or were they not? >It sounds like you've lost sight of the forest for the trees. Or have you? To me, the forest is graduating the best CS students, regardless of colour, race or gender.
    - alistairSH 11y ago
      The linked article mentions nothing about reducing standards. Nor do any of the other articles I found in a quick Google search. The only thing I found is the acceptance rate for women is higher than for me. BUT! The application numbers are skewed, with 3x as many men applying as women. The SAT scores of both genders are similar.
aplusbi 11y ago
What I find most interesting about this is that most of the changes they implemented weren't necessarily targeted towards women and benefited everyone (emphasis on group work, research projects, splitting the into classes by experience).
- zeveb 11y ago
  > What I find most interesting about this is that most of the changes they implemented weren't necessarily targeted towards women and benefited everyone (emphasis on group work, research projects, splitting the into classes by experience). I'll take exception to the first example: group work. I loathed and hated group work in college. It was simply and solely a way for people who couldn't hack the course material to manage a pass anyway. This might, of course, be good experience for life, but it's terrible for education. Research projects could be really, really good if they demand concrete results; they could be really terrible if they are just a way to reward effort without results. Splitting classes by experience might be a decent idea, although I've heard folks speak positively of one-room schoolhouses as well.
- mafribe 11y ago
  emphasis on group work, It's very questionable that this is a positiv change. While it is important (and difficult) to acquire teamwork skills, in practise, most groups gravitate towards one might call "Pareto Groups" where 20% of the participants do 80% of the work. Usually the strong programmers in the group do all the programming, thus getting all the learning experience.
  - phasmantistes 11y ago
    With the exception of two classes (Clinic and Large Software Development, which are both explicitly about learning to work in large teams), all the group work you do in the Mudd CS program is pair programming. The groups are 2 people, and you're required to take turns "driving". While I definitely experienced an unfortunate amount of "Pareto Groups" throughout my schooling, none of them were in the CS department at HMC.
  - lucidguppy 11y ago
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
CyberDildonics 11y ago
Did they also increase the number of men in social work majors?
- phasmantistes 11y ago
  The school primarily offers only STEM majors: Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Engineering, Computer Science, Math, and combinations of the above. It is associated with 4 other neighboring schools (Scripps, Pitzer, Pomona, and Claremont-McKenna), and so some students end up doing off-campus majors in History, Dance, Linguistics, or other fields, but that is comparatively rare (1 or 2 off-campus majors per graduating class, I think).
  - kelukelugames 11y ago
    You are fighting the good fight. I'm curious what kind of people think really think gender equality for social workers is a more pressing issue.
Kenji 11y ago
I still don't understand why a low ratio of women is considered a problem to be solved. Let people do what they want. Other majors have less men - so what? I loathe this retarded rhetoric. Has our society ran out of real problems?
- seany 11y ago
  When ever I bring that up I always get a "institutional sexism" based response, which seems bogus to me. We're it's like modern men are paying for past ills by being discriminated against. Where did the meritocracy go?
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago
  It depends upon why there is a low ratio. For example, if less men are being grade school teachers due to sexist double standards on judgments of teacher/student interactions, then that is an issue that needs to be fixed. The low ratio is a symptom, not the problem itself, but it helps indicate a problem that needs to be fixed. My issue is that sometimes instead of fixing the underlying problem(s), some people want to apply a patch that ends up not helping (or maybe making things worse).
  - Kenji 11y ago
    I don't think a low ration of women indicates a problem that needs to be fixed. I think this is a complete fallacy. I'd like to hear proof of why that is, then we can start fixing it.
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      Maybe not a complete fallacy. Some likely reasons: men hire more men. Women are hired but pushed out by stress. Women don't get promoted (or tenure or whatever) so leave. Women have heard its a terrible place for women and don't apply. All of these things should be fixed, if applicable. Because they are patently unfair to half the talented pool of candidates. Any school that pretends to understand mathematics would understand that puts the school at a disadvantage.
holmak 11y ago
I wonder what fraction of male Computer Science majors also come into their first semester with no programming experience. When I was a freshman, it seemed like absolutely everyone in my CS classes had been programming for years, but surely that's not the case for everyone? Anyway, the bit about (comparatively) experienced programmers intimidating the other students in freshman classes is a real and terrible thing. I thoroughly support shoving all those students into a different class; it is disruptive to have them in an intro course.
- brianwawok 11y ago
  +1000. I had the most advanced programming experience my high school offered (Q-Basic baby), but 100 level programming classes were pretty insane. Would have helped to maybe have a few more new to programming type classes with others in the same boat...
- ghaff 11y ago
  I took a MOOC offered by one of the elite schools that was based on their intro CS programming class. Although I'm not a programming professional, I've done a fair bit and have at least a degree of familiarity with the language the course used--as well as some basic concepts like sort algorithms, etc. For me, the course wasn't exactly hard but it certainly wasn't trivial and, had I never written a program (or touched a command line), I'm sure I would have been completely and utterly lost. Sign up for any MOOC in this vein and there are obviously lots of people for whom it's a totally bewildering experience. By comparison, when I took my first computer class in college, it was a truly introductory FORTRAN course that really didn't assume any prior knowledge. I did have a little BASIC in high school but that wasn't very common at the time.
- alistairSH 11y ago
  I can't speak about today, but when I started college (1995), it was common for students in the intro CS course to have zero experience coding. Some had built basic web pages, some had used *nix machines, but not many with actual coding. But, this course was also required for ALL engineers, so there were many separate sections/classes, and probably 80% or greater weren't interested in CS as a degree/career.
gjkood 11y ago
What can I do to increase the ratio of women in CS/Engineering? As the parent of a teenage boy and pre-teen girls here is what I do/can do. Start/Coach/Mentor a FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) Team for your teenager. I coach an FTC team. Start/Coach/Mentor a FIRST Lego League (FLL) Team for your pre-teen kids. I am in the process of forming an FLL team. Have them recruit their friends/classmates into the team. It can be a mixed gender team or all girls team. Training to compete in these events force you into being part of a team, apply STEM principles learned in school into actual practical engineering applications. Build Robots and have fun doing so. The FLL teams eventually feed into FTC or FRC teams. I think this will give them very early experiences into what engineering is all about and give them the confidence to take up these streams in later life. What is important is that at the earlier ages they are not yet peer pressured into gender specific expectations and is exposed to these topics in a positive way.
- apta 11y ago
  > What can I do to increase the ratio of women in CS/Engineering? The question is, why do you want to increase the ratio of women? Is it just for the sake of increasing the ratio? That's not the way to go then.
benten10 11y ago
PS: This is a very, very, very angry post, and you might want to avoid reading it if we want to avoid flame wars. OP, I don't have anything personal against you, I was just ticked off. It's also Friday, so I'm angry I'm not home like the rest of my team. alright boi, lets talk facts. Here are the facts: You were born, to parents beyond your choice/power, brought up in environment COMPLETELY beyond control, given opportunities that got you wherever the hell you are COMPLETELY arbitrarily, just because you happened to be in the right place in the right time. That you had anything to do with your success is 0.001% of the total story. So someone comes along and says, hey guys this is so totally random, like maybe we should make it less random. Maybe giving similar chances to people who didn't have ALL SIMILAR FUCKING ENVIRONMENTS would lead to greater good you know, because why do those random WHITE MEN who were fortunate enough to have been born in the right families get to go to all the right places, and get all the cool jobs. And then you say, no no, lets not talk about it. That's political correctness. What are the facts. Other people have added that standards have been maintained, etc. That's beyond the point. The fucking point is that what you call political correctness vs facts would work EXTREMELY AGAINSTS you if you wanted wanted to dig in too dig. See I'm not against riling against feminists and those damn good-for-nothing-minorities-all-seeking-special-privileges and 'all those politically correct special snowflake millennials', but please, stop it with the 'lets have the facts'. The fact is that forgetsusername, You're not a special snowflake, you had absolutely no reason to be wherever you are (just as no one else does), the world is an unfair place, but everyone is just slightly better off if we try to make it slightly nicer. "best CS students" fucking don't fall out of skies, granted by the grace of His Holiness Objective Vulcan Steve Jobs, they are made. And what everyone talks about when giving women and minorities louder voices, they mean that other people (apart from those that ALREADY have those privileges) should have it too. Please all, lets shut the "Political Correctness" vs "Facts" bullshit, dear objective Vulcan overlords.
- mafribe 11y ago
  Have you considered the fact that minorities like Indians and Chinese have no problem with being good at math and succeeding in Silicon Valley?
  - 11y ago
zeveb 11y ago
> They redesigned the intro computer science course to focus more on creative problem solving. Instead of traditional homework, the faculty assigned team-based projects so that students coded together. And, most important, they made the courses fun and emphasized ways in which CS can benefit society. What exactly does the first sentence mean? What is an example of an increased focus on problem solving, and on what was focus decreased? Are team assignments really just a way for weak performers to glide? I know in my own college career that was my experience. Is computer science about fun and benefiting society, or is it, y'know, the science of computation? Is it better to build a population of computer scientists who find the science of computation fun and self-evidently beneficial, or one of computer scientists who don't?
- mafribe 11y ago
  What exactly does the first sentence mean? It's a well-known euphemism for: making it easier, diluting standards, making grades easier to manipulate. Indeed just yesterday, my head of department suggested that I move from programming exercises to essays in my operating systems course, so as to have fewer students fail. The problem with math/programming is that there are fairly hard and objective and measurable criteria for how good a student performs. So let's get rid of programming ...
- douche 11y ago
  Yup, group projects and so-called "team-work" are where the bullshit artists go to ride the coat-tails of people who can actually do the work. On another note, why does everything have to be about benefiting society all the time? When I was an undergrad, I wanted to learn how to write a red-black tree, or how logic gates worked, not choke on force-fed activism. But I hate people, so... Ultimately, the beauty of coding is that it's just you and the machine. The machine is objective, it has no mercy, it demands that you be correct, and you be exact. You can't bullshit it, you can't hand wave it. Your idealistic O(nLog(n)) algorithm wilts in the face of the harsh reality of constant factors and memory access patterns. The machine doesn't care if you're black, white, or purple, nor whether you have bits that go in or bits that go out.
- jacobolus 11y ago
DrScump 11y ago
They could have called this program "Mudd's Women", but Paramount might have sued.

56 points by steven 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Why is shifting people from one major into another on face desirable? We should be glad there are less, eg, female biology majors and future doctors?

raldi 11y ago
If a young woman has equal potential as a future doctor or computer scientist, then sure, it's zero-sum whether she picks one versus the other. The problem is, there are undoubtedly a large number of young women out there who have the potential to become great programmers and love their careers, but for whatever reason, they're ending up becoming average doctors instead and feeling just so-so about their career choice. In the latter case, it's better for both the women in question, and society in general, to support their becoming computer scientists.
- _dark_matter_ 11y ago
  Or, more likely, they might finish their degree but not do well enough to go to Med School anyways, resulting in a different career path altogether.
- saulrh 11y ago
  My SO is one of the women who are better off because they got through a CS degree instead of an alternate. She could have been a good molecular biologist or teacher, but she's a spectacular software engineer, especially for those high-level business-use/architectural tasks that a lot of devs can't handle. She'd be a lot less happy right now if her dad had managed to succeed in convincing her that girls can't program.
tbabb 11y ago
The overwhelming skew in the CS population suggests that women either believe CS is not accessible to them (which isn't-- or should not be-- true), or that the community is unwelcoming to them (which is a problem in of itself and should be corrected, and means that motivated women are turning away from a field that would otherwise excite them). The skew is indicative of a problem. We should fix it.
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago
  Isn't it possible for the skew to also represent that it just isn't appealing (for example it may not be appealing due to socially conditioned gender roles)?
  - tbabb 11y ago
    We won't know if that's the case until we fix the glaring, skew-causing problems that are already there.
- sheepmullet 11y ago
  > The overwhelming skew in the CS population suggests that women either believe CS is not accessible to them It isn't for many of them. Not really. Not as a great career. I'm on ~$160k total comp as a senior software dev working full time. I want to move to a part time 20-25 hours and yet nobody wants to hire me for $80k/year part time.
daveguy 11y ago
You should read the article. What they did wasn't about shifting people from different majors on gender. It was about making CS more accessible in general. It probably increased their CS enrollment (and retainment) significantly. Some things they did: 1) separate experienced from inexperienced programmers in intro classes minimizing intimidation effects where it feels like you are behind from the start. 2) early research programs. Get students involved in applications of CS rather than just theory and fundamental programming for 2 years. 3) "share what works" and "demystify success" are communication with other colleges and moocs about what works in teaching cs along with giving more clear guidelines of what successful performance looks like. So. These have the added benefit of improving the gender gap, but really these are items that will help EVERY CS student. I don't think they corrected for impact of girls who code movements and increased encouragement in HS (eg increase if they had done nothing), but then it isn't a scientific study just a case study.
cortesoft 11y ago
Well, this article is written from the perspective of the CS field. The CS field wants more diversity, for many reasons (better pool of candidates, more diverse field, etc). Any field that has a very skewed demographic would probably have similar outreach initiatives to draw in the under-represented group.

fhood 11y ago

I think that splitting intro classes by experience is really important. In intro classes a lot of the more experienced (and thus less socially able) students are actively intimidating. I was helping out with a 100 level project and on the class forum people were "helping" by suggesting the use of regex and bit shifting. Intro students don't have to know about that yet, but seeing it in those settings makes them feel like they are behind everyone else.

alex_g 11y ago
at my school, most students take as their first CS course, a 123 course focused on a specific topic (app dev, robotics, computer graphics). No prior experience is required and apparently it has really improved on the number of students who drop out of the CS department after starting out with intro courses without seeing any real applications.
seizethecheese 11y ago
> In intro classes a lot of the more experienced (and thus less socially able) students are actively intimidating. I think the developer community should try to not perpetuate the stereotype that those with experience programming necessarily don't have social skills. This type of thing is what pigeonholes us as "nerds" who are incapable of being involved in the business side of projects.
- wskinner 11y ago
  Not sure why this is getting downvoted. I would add that in my own experience (took CS61a at Berkeley with no prior programming and little math) those guys who already had a lot of knowledge were inspiring and a great asset. Working with more knowledgable people is a fundamental feature of industry and academia, and if you view it from the right perspective, it doesn't have to be intimidating.
serge2k 11y ago
Why the hell would they be less socially able? Oh I took an intro to programming class in high school, liked it, and learned a bit more on my own. Guess I'm a social idiot now. Quit perpetuating negative stereotypes.

caseysoftware 11y ago

I serve on the CS advisory board at another college that competes head to head with Harvey Mudd for students. Generally, when one of these schools celebrates having more women or a higher ratio than the others, it means they've managed to recruit more of a static pool rather than growing the pool. The college that I advise at took another approach to grow the pool while also recruiting better from the pool. They encourage profs to work with Girl Scout troops on science projects, to get students to tutor junior high and high school kids in general, and build relationships long before the normal "I have to think about college" thoughts begin.

up_and_up 11y ago
> build relationships long before the normal "I have to think about college" thoughts begin That seems crazy that `colleges` are engaging in such a long sale cycle.
- pm90 11y ago
  It seems more like they are interested in getting kids to understand technology. If that was somehow coercive, then yes. But this sounds more like a bunch of people demoing stuff and letting kids check it out.
phasmantistes 11y ago
Yep, and Mudd actually does this as well. The example that comes to mind is that a bunch of students work with local FIRST Robotics and LEGO Robotics teams, including teams consisting entirely of women or of minorities.
jacobush 11y ago
It's not like recruiting more from a static pool is a bad thing either. But it's commendable your place is actually trying to grow the pool, I have a feeling you should start 10 years earlier. Help children feel CS is a natural place for women to be, you'll be getting somewhere. This sounds like the correct approach.
- 11y ago

gwern 11y ago

This has been discussed in the past on HN (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=harvey%20mudd&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=harvey%20mudd&sort=byPopularit...). The real howto is simple: take a tiny elite college; spend a staggering amount of money poaching the few women interested in CS to your college and loosening admission rates; proceed to talk only about percentages when boasting about your success.

phasmantistes 11y ago
First, you present this statement as though all the other conversations on HN about Harvey Mudd have come to the same conclusion. This is demonstrably not true. Second, I'd like to encourage you to not describe recruiting and admitting women as "lossening admission rates". That's the kind underhanded, unconscious sexism that we're trying to avoid here. Even if I accept as true that a higher percentage of men are qualified to be admitted to HMC's CS program (which I don't, but for the sake of argument...) the absolute number of people -- men, women, and otherwise -- who qualify is so much larger than what HMC can support that it could admit a class of 0 men and not have to worry about "lowering its standards". It sounds like you've lost sight of the forest for the trees. Sure, a larger school might be able to have a larger impact. Sure, maybe Mudd isn't doing as much as it could, or is spending more money than it should. But it is still doing something demonstrably effective, which is more than most places can say.
- forgetsusername 11y ago
  >That's the kind underhanded, unconscious sexism that we're trying to avoid here I'm interested in facts, not political correctness. Were admission rates loosened to accomplish the goals, or were they not? >It sounds like you've lost sight of the forest for the trees. Or have you? To me, the forest is graduating the best CS students, regardless of colour, race or gender.
  - alistairSH 11y ago
    The linked article mentions nothing about reducing standards. Nor do any of the other articles I found in a quick Google search. The only thing I found is the acceptance rate for women is higher than for me. BUT! The application numbers are skewed, with 3x as many men applying as women. The SAT scores of both genders are similar.

aplusbi 11y ago

What I find most interesting about this is that most of the changes they implemented weren't necessarily targeted towards women and benefited everyone (emphasis on group work, research projects, splitting the into classes by experience).

zeveb 11y ago
> What I find most interesting about this is that most of the changes they implemented weren't necessarily targeted towards women and benefited everyone (emphasis on group work, research projects, splitting the into classes by experience). I'll take exception to the first example: group work. I loathed and hated group work in college. It was simply and solely a way for people who couldn't hack the course material to manage a pass anyway. This might, of course, be good experience for life, but it's terrible for education. Research projects could be really, really good if they demand concrete results; they could be really terrible if they are just a way to reward effort without results. Splitting classes by experience might be a decent idea, although I've heard folks speak positively of one-room schoolhouses as well.
mafribe 11y ago
emphasis on group work, It's very questionable that this is a positiv change. While it is important (and difficult) to acquire teamwork skills, in practise, most groups gravitate towards one might call "Pareto Groups" where 20% of the participants do 80% of the work. Usually the strong programmers in the group do all the programming, thus getting all the learning experience.
- phasmantistes 11y ago
  With the exception of two classes (Clinic and Large Software Development, which are both explicitly about learning to work in large teams), all the group work you do in the Mudd CS program is pair programming. The groups are 2 people, and you're required to take turns "driving". While I definitely experienced an unfortunate amount of "Pareto Groups" throughout my schooling, none of them were in the CS department at HMC.
- lucidguppy 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

CyberDildonics 11y ago

Did they also increase the number of men in social work majors?

phasmantistes 11y ago
The school primarily offers only STEM majors: Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Engineering, Computer Science, Math, and combinations of the above. It is associated with 4 other neighboring schools (Scripps, Pitzer, Pomona, and Claremont-McKenna), and so some students end up doing off-campus majors in History, Dance, Linguistics, or other fields, but that is comparatively rare (1 or 2 off-campus majors per graduating class, I think).
- kelukelugames 11y ago
  You are fighting the good fight. I'm curious what kind of people think really think gender equality for social workers is a more pressing issue.

Kenji 11y ago

I still don't understand why a low ratio of women is considered a problem to be solved. Let people do what they want. Other majors have less men - so what? I loathe this retarded rhetoric. Has our society ran out of real problems?

seany 11y ago
When ever I bring that up I always get a "institutional sexism" based response, which seems bogus to me. We're it's like modern men are paying for past ills by being discriminated against. Where did the meritocracy go?
Lawtonfogle 11y ago
It depends upon why there is a low ratio. For example, if less men are being grade school teachers due to sexist double standards on judgments of teacher/student interactions, then that is an issue that needs to be fixed. The low ratio is a symptom, not the problem itself, but it helps indicate a problem that needs to be fixed. My issue is that sometimes instead of fixing the underlying problem(s), some people want to apply a patch that ends up not helping (or maybe making things worse).
- Kenji 11y ago
  I don't think a low ration of women indicates a problem that needs to be fixed. I think this is a complete fallacy. I'd like to hear proof of why that is, then we can start fixing it.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Maybe not a complete fallacy. Some likely reasons: men hire more men. Women are hired but pushed out by stress. Women don't get promoted (or tenure or whatever) so leave. Women have heard its a terrible place for women and don't apply. All of these things should be fixed, if applicable. Because they are patently unfair to half the talented pool of candidates. Any school that pretends to understand mathematics would understand that puts the school at a disadvantage.

holmak 11y ago

I wonder what fraction of male Computer Science majors also come into their first semester with no programming experience. When I was a freshman, it seemed like absolutely everyone in my CS classes had been programming for years, but surely that's not the case for everyone? Anyway, the bit about (comparatively) experienced programmers intimidating the other students in freshman classes is a real and terrible thing. I thoroughly support shoving all those students into a different class; it is disruptive to have them in an intro course.

brianwawok 11y ago
+1000. I had the most advanced programming experience my high school offered (Q-Basic baby), but 100 level programming classes were pretty insane. Would have helped to maybe have a few more new to programming type classes with others in the same boat...
ghaff 11y ago
I took a MOOC offered by one of the elite schools that was based on their intro CS programming class. Although I'm not a programming professional, I've done a fair bit and have at least a degree of familiarity with the language the course used--as well as some basic concepts like sort algorithms, etc. For me, the course wasn't exactly hard but it certainly wasn't trivial and, had I never written a program (or touched a command line), I'm sure I would have been completely and utterly lost. Sign up for any MOOC in this vein and there are obviously lots of people for whom it's a totally bewildering experience. By comparison, when I took my first computer class in college, it was a truly introductory FORTRAN course that really didn't assume any prior knowledge. I did have a little BASIC in high school but that wasn't very common at the time.
alistairSH 11y ago
I can't speak about today, but when I started college (1995), it was common for students in the intro CS course to have zero experience coding. Some had built basic web pages, some had used *nix machines, but not many with actual coding. But, this course was also required for ALL engineers, so there were many separate sections/classes, and probably 80% or greater weren't interested in CS as a degree/career.

gjkood 11y ago

What can I do to increase the ratio of women in CS/Engineering? As the parent of a teenage boy and pre-teen girls here is what I do/can do. Start/Coach/Mentor a FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) Team for your teenager. I coach an FTC team. Start/Coach/Mentor a FIRST Lego League (FLL) Team for your pre-teen kids. I am in the process of forming an FLL team. Have them recruit their friends/classmates into the team. It can be a mixed gender team or all girls team. Training to compete in these events force you into being part of a team, apply STEM principles learned in school into actual practical engineering applications. Build Robots and have fun doing so. The FLL teams eventually feed into FTC or FRC teams. I think this will give them very early experiences into what engineering is all about and give them the confidence to take up these streams in later life. What is important is that at the earlier ages they are not yet peer pressured into gender specific expectations and is exposed to these topics in a positive way.

apta 11y ago
> What can I do to increase the ratio of women in CS/Engineering? The question is, why do you want to increase the ratio of women? Is it just for the sake of increasing the ratio? That's not the way to go then.

benten10 11y ago

PS: This is a very, very, very angry post, and you might want to avoid reading it if we want to avoid flame wars. OP, I don't have anything personal against you, I was just ticked off. It's also Friday, so I'm angry I'm not home like the rest of my team. alright boi, lets talk facts. Here are the facts: You were born, to parents beyond your choice/power, brought up in environment COMPLETELY beyond control, given opportunities that got you wherever the hell you are COMPLETELY arbitrarily, just because you happened to be in the right place in the right time. That you had anything to do with your success is 0.001% of the total story. So someone comes along and says, hey guys this is so totally random, like maybe we should make it less random. Maybe giving similar chances to people who didn't have ALL SIMILAR FUCKING ENVIRONMENTS would lead to greater good you know, because why do those random WHITE MEN who were fortunate enough to have been born in the right families get to go to all the right places, and get all the cool jobs. And then you say, no no, lets not talk about it. That's political correctness. What are the facts. Other people have added that standards have been maintained, etc. That's beyond the point. The fucking point is that what you call political correctness vs facts would work EXTREMELY AGAINSTS you if you wanted wanted to dig in too dig. See I'm not against riling against feminists and those damn good-for-nothing-minorities-all-seeking-special-privileges and 'all those politically correct special snowflake millennials', but please, stop it with the 'lets have the facts'. The fact is that forgetsusername, You're not a special snowflake, you had absolutely no reason to be wherever you are (just as no one else does), the world is an unfair place, but everyone is just slightly better off if we try to make it slightly nicer. "best CS students" fucking don't fall out of skies, granted by the grace of His Holiness Objective Vulcan Steve Jobs, they are made. And what everyone talks about when giving women and minorities louder voices, they mean that other people (apart from those that ALREADY have those privileges) should have it too. Please all, lets shut the "Political Correctness" vs "Facts" bullshit, dear objective Vulcan overlords.

mafribe 11y ago
Have you considered the fact that minorities like Indians and Chinese have no problem with being good at math and succeeding in Silicon Valley?
- 11y ago

zeveb 11y ago

> They redesigned the intro computer science course to focus more on creative problem solving. Instead of traditional homework, the faculty assigned team-based projects so that students coded together. And, most important, they made the courses fun and emphasized ways in which CS can benefit society. What exactly does the first sentence mean? What is an example of an increased focus on problem solving, and on what was focus decreased? Are team assignments really just a way for weak performers to glide? I know in my own college career that was my experience. Is computer science about fun and benefiting society, or is it, y'know, the science of computation? Is it better to build a population of computer scientists who find the science of computation fun and self-evidently beneficial, or one of computer scientists who don't?

mafribe 11y ago
What exactly does the first sentence mean? It's a well-known euphemism for: making it easier, diluting standards, making grades easier to manipulate. Indeed just yesterday, my head of department suggested that I move from programming exercises to essays in my operating systems course, so as to have fewer students fail. The problem with math/programming is that there are fairly hard and objective and measurable criteria for how good a student performs. So let's get rid of programming ...
douche 11y ago
Yup, group projects and so-called "team-work" are where the bullshit artists go to ride the coat-tails of people who can actually do the work. On another note, why does everything have to be about benefiting society all the time? When I was an undergrad, I wanted to learn how to write a red-black tree, or how logic gates worked, not choke on force-fed activism. But I hate people, so... Ultimately, the beauty of coding is that it's just you and the machine. The machine is objective, it has no mercy, it demands that you be correct, and you be exact. You can't bullshit it, you can't hand wave it. Your idealistic O(nLog(n)) algorithm wilts in the face of the harsh reality of constant factors and memory access patterns. The machine doesn't care if you're black, white, or purple, nor whether you have bits that go in or bits that go out.
jacobolus 11y ago

DrScump 11y ago

They could have called this program "Mudd's Women", but Paramount might have sued.