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To be fair, they do a pretty bad job teaching CS too. Your average undergrad program is almost entirely learning about CS, not learning CS. A non-trivial of stu
by tikhonj 9y ago
To be fair, they do a pretty bad job teaching CS too. Your average undergrad program is almost entirely learning about CS, not learning CS. A non-trivial of students get through a CS degree never doing anything novel in CS—a real shame because, unlike math, research-level CS problems are eminently accessible to undergrads.
It doesn't even have to be "real" research: I just expect more than classes which have you regurgitate what you learned to pass. And yet that's all you need to get a CS degree. It's a bit like learning to write by filling in blanks.
- ninkendo 9y ago> classes which have you regurgitate what you learned to pass I think that's what school is, no? I'm not trying to be glib, I think this is just a reality of how education works in pretty much all subjects (typical US academia, YMMV etc.) Can you name a major that doesn't work this way?
- aeorgnoieang 9y agoI had to write real proofs (tho I didn't fail completely if it wasn't free of errors) for my U.S. math undergrad degree.
- dsp1234 9y agoDid those proofs have to be novel, or were the proofs of already known concepts?
- alphaalpha101 9y agoOf course they have to be novel! You aren't allowed to just copy them off someone else.
- vecter 9y agoI'm sure those proofs at the time were novel to the student but obviously not the professor who assigned the problem. That's how the student learns.
- mcphage 9y agoNovel to the student up to a point—math students are taught a variety of proof techniques in each of their subjects, theorems that students are required to prove generally fall to very similar techniques.
- umanwizard 9y agoThey have to be novel in my experience. I have a BS in Mathematics from a mediocre school (University of Arizona) and exams were always "prove this fact (which you have never heard of before)", never "what is the proof of XYZ theorem (which we studied)"
- posterboy 9y agothere is so much room for questions, it's quicker to write the proof than to search an answer. And a readily found answer would, for undergrad, less likely be in proof form, or too distinct for specific topics later on. And the instructor might become suspicious and interogate you, in which case, if the material helped you to understand, that's the point.
- alphaalpha101 9y agoYou could make the argument that the software engineering students writing programmes in their degree wrote more and bigger proofs than we did learning mathematics.
- dsp1234 9y agoYour average undergrad program... CS degree never doing anything novel in CS Is this different than any other field? I was under the impression that most BS programs do not require novel research. That doesn't come until post graduate courses.
- edanm 9y agoI think it doesn't come until a second degree, or sometimes a graduate degree. Not post graduate.
- umanwizard 9y agoSomething was lost in translation here. Graduate degree and postgraduate degree mean the same thing, at least in the US.
- tikhonj 9y agoI don't necessarily mean publishable—that's doable but difficult in CS—but novel in the sense of requiring non-trivial creativity and insight within the field rather than replaying things you were taught directly. An example might be writing a compiler for a language you design with features not covered in the book. It's probably not publishable, but it is doing CS in a way that just following instructions in a book or from lectures to write a compiler isn't.
- maksimum 9y agoSo personal projects that extend the material you learn in courses and take 1-2 semesters to complete? I think plenty of schools already do that as part of a BA/BS graduation requirement.
- astura 9y agoYou just must have had a bad CS program, my undergraduate degree involved plenty of those types of projects.
- Y7ZCQtNo39 9y agoI don't think industry needs every CS graduate to produce something novel. The work of many is just building upon the work of others.
- 0xCMP 9y ago"novel = of value" in this case. Fill in the blank programs ("Here's the skeleton, make it display a list") and 3 projects with < 200 lines that aren't doing something CS specific are not novel, but all too common and wide spread.
- Y7ZCQtNo39 9y agoA lot of things of business value go like this, for example: go build this UI in React, etc. You don't need the ability to significantly return something back to academia to do that. You just need good coding mechanics.
- 0xCMP 9y agoNot the point: college is for CS. Not for "building on the work of others." You learn the basics that everyone needs to do the advanced work. If that isn't needed/useful then you need a vocational school instead of a CS program. Making people do continual simple demos and nonsense programs instead of teaching them actual CS is BS. They can be simple programs, they don't need to build huge things, but what they build should reveal and teach them things beyond how to shift text around the screen.
- Y7ZCQtNo39 9y agoAre there vocational programs beyond those 20-week'ish coding schools? Because those don't seem to equip people with quite enough skill.