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> The most common complaint in my program from students was that we weren't actually learning how to program Exactly this. While working for a Fortune 50 engin

• kbenson 9y ago
  Well, it depends on what the purpose of the degree was. I would say that with a good foundation of knowledge, it's fairly easy for someone to do directed personal work and learn how to program better. Doing the same thing to learn theory of computation and algorithm analysis would be much, much harder without a mentor available to walk you through the more complex and troublesome bits. It is entirely possible that my school took this a bit too far (or that might have been the norm at the time). At the same time, some students were complaining that our major wasn't treated the same as others, as our lab time didn't count for the same amount of credits as other majors. For example, I believe a 2-hour of instruction and 3-hours of lab time class for chemistry was 5 credits, but 4 credits for CS, leading to more in-class time required than some other majors. I personally didn't care, and didn't even know about it until my last semester. Depending on how you look at it, it's actually not a detriment, but a bonus of the major. That said, the electives available to CS did have more practical experience, such as the OO programming one taught using Java (I graduated probably a year or two before they switched from C++ to Java as the main teaching language).