4 ms·

>a lot of people who have degrees have no clue how to code I don't understand how this is possible. I know CS != coding, but every CS degree syllabus I've look

• mike_hearn 4y ago
  It works like this: Step 1. The academics are themselves not that good at coding or teaching, and/or aren't interested in them. This might sound contradictory for a CS course, but at my university (as an example) the CS dept was run by a guy whose actual background was in mathematics. He loved hiring graph theory researchers and didn't like hiring people who knew programming. Step 2. They try to teach programming to a class of newbies, but fail miserably because teaching programming is hard. Step 3. They find ways to cover up the fact that nobody is learning to code properly. This can take many forms. At my university (a supposedly 'elite' British uni) they had evolved at least six or seven different tricks for this. Step 4. Because nobody seems to be accountable for anything and the whole academic hierarchy is in on the scam, nothing gets fixed. Students who complain that they aren't being taught properly are simply punished with low grades. Because grades aren't connected to anything real or objective, there is no recourse. A few of the tricks they used to cover up the lack of learning: • Programming assignments that had almost all points allocated to the associated English-language "report", not code. As a consequence marks were arbitrary and depended mostly on whether the profs liked you or not. • Unrealistic deadlines/workloads were set. Students who didn't submit work on time/whose programs crashed immediately on startup were then given extra time. Students who submitted work that started up were graded as-is on the deadline. This evened out the grades between self-taught programmers and those who were struggling. • Group projects in which the group composition was fixed by the staff. They administered a programming test at the start of the course to identify those who had already taught themselves coding and then ensured every group had one such person. That person then did all the work, and the others in the group either slacked off or wrote the associated "report". • Assessments in which the professors/TAs simply looked at the running program on the student's screen to judge if it worked. Students were informed of this practice up front, thus you could pass a programming exercise by simply making mockups in which the buttons didn't actually do anything, or updated the UI in hard coded ways. And so on. I put report in quotes because the contents of these reports was primarily make-work. The golden rule - at no point in the entire course did any of the teachers actually do a code review of any kind. Code was written but not read. Needless to say, cheating was rampant. None of the above can be fixed because academics are marking their own homework.
  • pinum 4y ago
    In that case I think we really do need the software engineering equivalent of the bar exam, as another commenter suggested.
    • mike_hearn 4y ago
      It'd probably just create new problems. After all, degrees are supposedly regulated by governments already, but they aren't doing it properly. Why would some state-issued license be any better? In theory, if there was demand for it the private sector could fix this by issuing certifications. In practice certifications aren't especially useful or well recognized, as the sort of people with the best skills don't see any need to take them. It's much easier and lower effort to demonstrate your skills in an interview. See this thread - people don't have the time/will to do take-home assignments that are meant to consume a few hours, tops (and I totally get that, I wouldn't want to either). They certainly wouldn't be happy if you suddenly told them they all had to cram for and take some government designed exam that checked their knowledge of e.g. Java 1.4 otherwise they'd all lose their jobs!
      • anon291 4y ago
        American degrees are decidedly not regulated by government. Professional groups and accreditation agencies perhaps, but not having a professional certification doesn't prevent a university from granting said degree. It's just one that some companies may not accept
  • HappyDreamer 4y ago
    > They find ways to cover up the fact that nobody is learning to code properly Aha, so the secret summary is that: Both students and teachers want the students to succeed, so they cheat together, to make that (seem to) happen > A few of the tricks they used Thanks for writing about that, really interesting to read (!) > cheating was rampant (You don't happen to know about some websites being used for that? I recently found out about studypool dot com.)
    • 4y ago