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Eliminating 6.001 also seems to me a part of a trend to allow more freedom in the EECS curriculum. Aside from eliminating 6.001 (which is the most talked about

Eliminating 6.001 also seems to me a part of a trend to allow more freedom in the EECS curriculum. Aside from eliminating 6.001 (which is the most talked about change), computer science students now have more freedom to take computer science courses (rather than certain required electrical engineering courses) and vice versa. For example, in the old curriculum, electrical engineers had to take 6.001 and computer scientists had to take 6.003 (signals and systems). IMHO, the more freedom, the better. If you are concerned about having a well rounded education in EECS, then you can sit down with your advisor, or talk to your friends, and ultimately decide to take the old curriculum anyway. On that note, it would have been nice if they kept 6.001 for those who still wanted to take it.

hga 16y ago
"Eliminating 6.001 also seems to me a part of a trend to allow more freedom in the EECS curriculum." What the elimination of the required for everyone 6.001-4 (EECS's Unified???) says is that the department no longer believes there's a broad core of materiel everyone needs to learn. As described to me, a MIT EECS degree used to mean that an EE wouldn't freeze up when asked to do some embedded programming and a CS wouldn't freeze up when having to integrate digital electronics into a project. Today, a MIT EECS degree means something different. This new thing may be better, may be worse, which will depend on lots of things and the judgment of history. And agreed on the dropping of 6.001. If I had been able to finish my degree in Chemistry (finances prevented that) 6.001 would have been all I would have really wanted to take out of the department's offerings. It certainly was and it a tremendous and pioneering crown jewel of CS (and just happens to cover or provide the foundation for just about all of CS that I'm really interested in). And the promise of teaching a 12 unit version of it (the old version was 15 (that means number of hours per week it in theory consumes)) somehow dropped by the wayside....

hga 16y ago

"Eliminating 6.001 also seems to me a part of a trend to allow more freedom in the EECS curriculum." What the elimination of the required for everyone 6.001-4 (EECS's Unified???) says is that the department no longer believes there's a broad core of materiel everyone needs to learn. As described to me, a MIT EECS degree used to mean that an EE wouldn't freeze up when asked to do some embedded programming and a CS wouldn't freeze up when having to integrate digital electronics into a project. Today, a MIT EECS degree means something different. This new thing may be better, may be worse, which will depend on lots of things and the judgment of history. And agreed on the dropping of 6.001. If I had been able to finish my degree in Chemistry (finances prevented that) 6.001 would have been all I would have really wanted to take out of the department's offerings. It certainly was and it a tremendous and pioneering crown jewel of CS (and just happens to cover or provide the foundation for just about all of CS that I'm really interested in). And the promise of teaching a 12 unit version of it (the old version was 15 (that means number of hours per week it in theory consumes)) somehow dropped by the wayside....