4 ms·

> The core requirements for a cs major at a typical university (read: not CMU,MIT,Stanford,Berkeley) and especially at a non flagship is basically 4 or 5 course

by Merad 9y ago

> The core requirements for a cs major at a typical university (read: not CMU,MIT,Stanford,Berkeley) and especially at a non flagship is basically 4 or 5 courses, which you can for sure cram into 6 months if that's all you're studying. Huh? That's an incredibly terrible CS curriculum. 4-5 courses is at most 20 credit hours. A typical undergrad degree requires about 120 credit hours of courses before you can graduate. I went to a second tier state school and our CS curriculum had 12 common required courses (excluding seminar courses) that everyone took, plus three upper level electives of your choice. Basically half of the four year degree was CS.

throwawayjava 9y ago
Please see my other comments. I'm talking about the set of courses that are 1) offered by the CS department and that 2) every student must take. Not even the entire set of cs courses. Just the ones every student must take. > A typical undergrad degree requires about 120 credit hours of courses before you can graduate* Obviously you cannot get an entire degree in 6 months. You can't even finish all of the required coursework. That's why I said "core CS sequence", not "a degree".
- Merad 9y ago
  > I'm talking about the set of courses that are 1) offered by the CS department and that 2) every student must take. As I said, that was a dozen courses at my school.
  - throwawayjava 9y ago
    12 CS courses, offered by the CS dept, and that everyone takes means that either A) your department was internalizing a LOT of service courses; B) left very little room for differentiation within your major; or C) provided very little time for exploration outside of your major. Either way, that level of straight-jacketing and/or in-sourcing is atypical. Even at top schools that number is usually below 10. E.g. CMU 6 (well 7, but really 6); Berkeley 4-6; MIT 8; Standford 6. These are all off the high end of my 4-5 estimate, but only because they ALL in-source a course that at most places would be farmed out the math dept and therefore not counted by my criteria. And MIT also a comm course. Plus, there's the other extreme of places that only require the intro sequence and an algorithms course, leaving all else to the students. In order to get up to 12 at any of these places you'd need to only offer one course for a lot of the "breadth" requirements, or else in-source the calculus sequence (or similar silly things). Again, I'm counting courses offered by the CS dept, AND that everyone takes. The minimum viable "common knowledge" we can reliably assume is shared among all CS majors, as offered by the CS dept. IME 4-5 is pretty typical. Maybe 6. Yes, we also assume some background in other fields of study from CS graduates (some calculus, reading/writing skills, etc.) But those courses are not the ones I was referring to with my 4-5 count. They were also addressed in my original comment.
    - ptr_void 9y ago
      > is atypical I don't think it's very atypical, for example take a look at this course requirement for City College of New York under CUNY : https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/sites/default/files/csc-prereqs-042116.pdf https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/sites/default/files/csc-prereqs-04... Under the CS parts, only the elective in category A, B, and C is where student can pick and choose. Everything else under the grey curve across the pdf are: > courses offered by the CS dept, AND that everyone takes.

by Merad 9y ago

throwawayjava 9y ago

Please see my other comments. I'm talking about the set of courses that are 1) offered by the CS department and that 2) every student must take. Not even the entire set of cs courses. Just the ones every student must take. > A typical undergrad degree requires about 120 credit hours of courses before you can graduate* Obviously you cannot get an entire degree in 6 months. You can't even finish all of the required coursework. That's why I said "core CS sequence", not "a degree".

Merad 9y ago
> I'm talking about the set of courses that are 1) offered by the CS department and that 2) every student must take. As I said, that was a dozen courses at my school.
- throwawayjava 9y ago
  12 CS courses, offered by the CS dept, and that everyone takes means that either A) your department was internalizing a LOT of service courses; B) left very little room for differentiation within your major; or C) provided very little time for exploration outside of your major. Either way, that level of straight-jacketing and/or in-sourcing is atypical. Even at top schools that number is usually below 10. E.g. CMU 6 (well 7, but really 6); Berkeley 4-6; MIT 8; Standford 6. These are all off the high end of my 4-5 estimate, but only because they ALL in-source a course that at most places would be farmed out the math dept and therefore not counted by my criteria. And MIT also a comm course. Plus, there's the other extreme of places that only require the intro sequence and an algorithms course, leaving all else to the students. In order to get up to 12 at any of these places you'd need to only offer one course for a lot of the "breadth" requirements, or else in-source the calculus sequence (or similar silly things). Again, I'm counting courses offered by the CS dept, AND that everyone takes. The minimum viable "common knowledge" we can reliably assume is shared among all CS majors, as offered by the CS dept. IME 4-5 is pretty typical. Maybe 6. Yes, we also assume some background in other fields of study from CS graduates (some calculus, reading/writing skills, etc.) But those courses are not the ones I was referring to with my 4-5 count. They were also addressed in my original comment.
  - ptr_void 9y ago
    > is atypical I don't think it's very atypical, for example take a look at this course requirement for City College of New York under CUNY : https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/sites/default/files/csc-prereqs-042116.pdf https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/sites/default/files/csc-prereqs-04... Under the CS parts, only the elective in category A, B, and C is where student can pick and choose. Everything else under the grey curve across the pdf are: > courses offered by the CS dept, AND that everyone takes.