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The College of Computing has been alienating their more academic members in favor of "industry" orientation. I suspect that this comes from trying to increase

by ynniv 17y ago

The College of Computing has been alienating their more academic members in favor of "industry" orientation. I suspect that this comes from trying to increase funding, but more simply it is indicative that those making the decisions no longer have a clear vision of what they are teaching students. It isn't enough to say that they are showing preference to C based languages, as one of the primary "weeder" courses which was taught in C was discontinued years ago. I don't know if this uncertainty and doubt of academic computer science is limited to Georgia Tech. Just recently, MIT dropped their scheme course for one in python, with the goal of being more "practical". Is it better for undergraduate computer science to be practical or academic? I will suggest that if students don't learn abstract computing when they are undergrads, they are never going to.

jsolson 17y ago
To be fair, when 2130 (along with the ECE2030 requirement) was cut they replaced it with 2110 and 3240. As I understand it (I tested for standing, so I can't claim first-hand knowledge), 2110 does a very good job of combining the relevant parts of ECE2030 and the C bits of CS2130. That, to me, makes it a solid replacement for those concepts. The first time 3240 was taught, Olin was the professor teaching it. It covered a fair chunk of the material you'd expect to see in CS4510 that semester while also being an excellent class on lexers, parsers, and interpreters (not so much on compilers, but of course it's not a compilers course). I can comfortably say that it was by far the most interesting and educational course I took during my undergrad career. Since Olin's unfortunate departure, 3240 has apparently turned into just another lexer and parser course. On the whole I'd say the changes they made w.r.t. CS2130 were good. However... Threads has made it so that you can get a CS degree without taking an algorithms or data structures course above the 1000 level, which I find wholly disappointing. It's not that the degrees these students are walking away with aren't perfectly valid things to have degrees in, but I have a hard time calling a lot of these undergrads "computer scientists". </rant>

by ynniv 17y ago

jsolson 17y ago

To be fair, when 2130 (along with the ECE2030 requirement) was cut they replaced it with 2110 and 3240. As I understand it (I tested for standing, so I can't claim first-hand knowledge), 2110 does a very good job of combining the relevant parts of ECE2030 and the C bits of CS2130. That, to me, makes it a solid replacement for those concepts. The first time 3240 was taught, Olin was the professor teaching it. It covered a fair chunk of the material you'd expect to see in CS4510 that semester while also being an excellent class on lexers, parsers, and interpreters (not so much on compilers, but of course it's not a compilers course). I can comfortably say that it was by far the most interesting and educational course I took during my undergrad career. Since Olin's unfortunate departure, 3240 has apparently turned into just another lexer and parser course. On the whole I'd say the changes they made w.r.t. CS2130 were good. However... Threads has made it so that you can get a CS degree without taking an algorithms or data structures course above the 1000 level, which I find wholly disappointing. It's not that the degrees these students are walking away with aren't perfectly valid things to have degrees in, but I have a hard time calling a lot of these undergrads "computer scientists". </rant>