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Why would you call the French academic system abysmal? My experience of it was quite positive (granted I was in a grande école). Also I don't understand why yo

by carlob 14y ago

Why would you call the French academic system abysmal? My experience of it was quite positive (granted I was in a grande école). Also I don't understand why you say that the students graduating from grandes écoles are technically incompetent. I believe they've produced a ton of world class scientists and engineers: last year's Physics' Nobel prize winner, half of the last batch of Fields medallists to name a few…

freehunter 14y ago
What I understood from his post was that he's saying the schools the business guys attend and the schools the technical guys attend are different, so you don't get a mix of the two that would lead to great things. Not that all students graduating from grandes ecoles are technically incompetent, just that some of them are, from specific schools, and some others are business-incompetent.
- carlob 14y ago
  Well then that's just inaccurate there are a lot of technically inclined managers coming out of École Polytechnique. If one really wanted to criticize the way these manager-engineers are educated I'd say they are too geared towards the public sector and large enterprises, but that's the aim of these schools anyway: to educate the highest ranking civil servants.
  - rtpg 14y ago
    Polytechnique is one school that takes in 200 people a year. And they're definitely a different beast, mainly by the fact of being some of the smartest people in the country. But people going to Polytechnique are going there to become businessmen, rarely (if ever) to get their hands dirty in technical stuff. Their life is pretty well set from that school.
    - carlob 14y ago
      Make that 500. Isn't it comparable to MIT that takes about 1000 undergraduates a year? Normalize by country population and you'll see that MIT is even more selective.
Raphael_Amiard 14y ago
> Also I don't understand why you say that the students graduating from grandes écoles are technically incompetent. I believe that this is a false statement regarding the domains of physics, mathematics, or general engineering, but i think the level of engineers out of grandes ecoles in comp-sci and programming is really far from stellar, being easily surpassed by students out of universities. I actually had a few courses at Telecom Paristech : http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%A9l%C3%A9com_ParisTech http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%A9l%C3%A9com_ParisTech The level of the exams was quite low compared to anything i had at university. The course itself was as most of the courses i had at university, quite good technical and theoretical content, very bad pedagogy, and utterly terrible practice projects. A quick glance at what is available at top american universities convinced me that this is a real problem in French comp-sci education. See thoses courses for an example of what i mean when i think "good practice projects": http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-828-operating-system-engineering-fall-2006/assignments/ http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput... https://www.coursera.org/course/compilers https://www.coursera.org/course/compilers https://www.coursera.org/course/hetero https://www.coursera.org/course/hetero
- Wilya 14y ago
  The demand for people with good applied computer science skills in France is very low, from what I have seen, so that's kind of understandable that there are no courses for that. On the one hand, the pure coding and enterprise tasks are given to people from lower tier/more specialized schools, who are less expensive but mostly lack the advanced comp-sci knowledge. On the other hand, people in pure research fields don't care about your applied skills.
- gommm 14y ago
  Anecdotally, I went to a Grande Ecole studying Computer Science: INSA of Rennes and I was an exchange student at RIT in rochester. The level of the classes and exams at RIT was much lower than what I had back in france (and a lot of exams had rote learning at RIT, I remember questions like: Which companies drafted the openGL specifications? which is beyond useless and stupid.) The examples of practice projects you listed for OS and compilers are similar to what we did. We also had a fourth year practice project that lasted all the year in a 6 students team and which was really interesting: we were working on a cross platform networked Tarot game with an expert system implemented in Prolog. It was really fun :-) Of course, it also depends on the grande école or university you go to and I'm quite sure that for example MIT is much better than RIT for example.
rtpg 14y ago
Maybe I should clarify: The french university system is abysmal. The grande ecole recruits all the best minds, and these schools make for very good members of society, but it comes at the cost of specialisation. These people get maybe 1 or 2 years at most of actual specialisation. Basically people getting out of these schools are very smart and know a bit about very many domains. It's just that, for having spent 5 years in the school system, they'll know a lot less about their domain than others having spent 5 years in an american university (for example). In 99% of cases this is not important. You learn everything on the job anyways, and people going through the grande ecole system makes you very good at learning quickly and effectively. It's just that while in school you might be a bit useless, and when you get into the workforce, you'll end up with a pretty cushy job anyways.
- carlob 14y ago
  Fair enough French _universities_ are pretty bad. So what? How do they compare with non-elite American universities? There is a large movement of entrepreneurs in the US that are encouraging bright students to drop out of college, because they think that college has become completely ineffective in teaching useful work skills. Maybe it's because of overspecialization. I don't want to defend the French system, which I sincerely despise for political reasons (this two tiered system is an important cause of social injustice in France), but the American academic system doesn't seem to compare favorably with it, especially in comp-sci curricula.

by carlob 14y ago

freehunter 14y ago

What I understood from his post was that he's saying the schools the business guys attend and the schools the technical guys attend are different, so you don't get a mix of the two that would lead to great things. Not that all students graduating from grandes ecoles are technically incompetent, just that some of them are, from specific schools, and some others are business-incompetent.

carlob 14y ago
Well then that's just inaccurate there are a lot of technically inclined managers coming out of École Polytechnique. If one really wanted to criticize the way these manager-engineers are educated I'd say they are too geared towards the public sector and large enterprises, but that's the aim of these schools anyway: to educate the highest ranking civil servants.
- rtpg 14y ago
  Polytechnique is one school that takes in 200 people a year. And they're definitely a different beast, mainly by the fact of being some of the smartest people in the country. But people going to Polytechnique are going there to become businessmen, rarely (if ever) to get their hands dirty in technical stuff. Their life is pretty well set from that school.
  - carlob 14y ago
    Make that 500. Isn't it comparable to MIT that takes about 1000 undergraduates a year? Normalize by country population and you'll see that MIT is even more selective.

Raphael_Amiard 14y ago

> Also I don't understand why you say that the students graduating from grandes écoles are technically incompetent. I believe that this is a false statement regarding the domains of physics, mathematics, or general engineering, but i think the level of engineers out of grandes ecoles in comp-sci and programming is really far from stellar, being easily surpassed by students out of universities. I actually had a few courses at Telecom Paristech : http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%A9l%C3%A9com_ParisTech http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%A9l%C3%A9com_ParisTech The level of the exams was quite low compared to anything i had at university. The course itself was as most of the courses i had at university, quite good technical and theoretical content, very bad pedagogy, and utterly terrible practice projects. A quick glance at what is available at top american universities convinced me that this is a real problem in French comp-sci education. See thoses courses for an example of what i mean when i think "good practice projects": http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-828-operating-system-engineering-fall-2006/assignments/ http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput... https://www.coursera.org/course/compilers https://www.coursera.org/course/compilers https://www.coursera.org/course/hetero https://www.coursera.org/course/hetero

Wilya 14y ago
The demand for people with good applied computer science skills in France is very low, from what I have seen, so that's kind of understandable that there are no courses for that. On the one hand, the pure coding and enterprise tasks are given to people from lower tier/more specialized schools, who are less expensive but mostly lack the advanced comp-sci knowledge. On the other hand, people in pure research fields don't care about your applied skills.
gommm 14y ago
Anecdotally, I went to a Grande Ecole studying Computer Science: INSA of Rennes and I was an exchange student at RIT in rochester. The level of the classes and exams at RIT was much lower than what I had back in france (and a lot of exams had rote learning at RIT, I remember questions like: Which companies drafted the openGL specifications? which is beyond useless and stupid.) The examples of practice projects you listed for OS and compilers are similar to what we did. We also had a fourth year practice project that lasted all the year in a 6 students team and which was really interesting: we were working on a cross platform networked Tarot game with an expert system implemented in Prolog. It was really fun :-) Of course, it also depends on the grande école or university you go to and I'm quite sure that for example MIT is much better than RIT for example.

rtpg 14y ago

Maybe I should clarify: The french university system is abysmal. The grande ecole recruits all the best minds, and these schools make for very good members of society, but it comes at the cost of specialisation. These people get maybe 1 or 2 years at most of actual specialisation. Basically people getting out of these schools are very smart and know a bit about very many domains. It's just that, for having spent 5 years in the school system, they'll know a lot less about their domain than others having spent 5 years in an american university (for example). In 99% of cases this is not important. You learn everything on the job anyways, and people going through the grande ecole system makes you very good at learning quickly and effectively. It's just that while in school you might be a bit useless, and when you get into the workforce, you'll end up with a pretty cushy job anyways.

carlob 14y ago
Fair enough French _universities_ are pretty bad. So what? How do they compare with non-elite American universities? There is a large movement of entrepreneurs in the US that are encouraging bright students to drop out of college, because they think that college has become completely ineffective in teaching useful work skills. Maybe it's because of overspecialization. I don't want to defend the French system, which I sincerely despise for political reasons (this two tiered system is an important cause of social injustice in France), but the American academic system doesn't seem to compare favorably with it, especially in comp-sci curricula.