Junior developer woes
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Definitely in the camp where the organization (not the recent graduate) was TRWTF....
Also, people confuse "computer SCIENCE" with practical Application Development. I would be willing to bet that I could take 100 of the "best" senior software developers/architects and ask them to explain exactly how the computer works and have none of them be able to describe it down to the transistor level. NOR should they be able to.
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The teacher shares responsibility for the students' education.
I would consider myself to have failed too
if I have really low pass rate on a course, I will review the course
So, to be clear, you agree with my statement?
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Almost. The review is my initiative, and not something that the VC has anything to do with. I am not and should not be held at fault for upholding quality.
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In other engineering disciplines, such as electronic or mechanical, certifications are rare. In theory, I could have gotten a PE certification
Software PE now exists. This link implies that at least ten people have attainted the certification. So far, it seems nobody cares about it.
but it would have been a long, expensive process
Really? I took the EIT exam my senior year in college and the only extra work I had to do was a few days of studying and an 8-hour exam. In order to get a PE, all that was left was four years of experience and another exam.
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If it's one class, then no. It's an indicator of teacher performance, but not a result of teacher performance.
However, if it consistent despite the makeup of the class (which I have examples of) then it is most certainly the teacher's fault.
I've had teachers tell me it's their job to fail students.
So, teacher's DO share responsibility for passing their students.
If you think your only responsibility is to expose students to information, then I have a library that's vastly superior to you for that purpose.
upholding quality
No, but you are responsible for ensuring that, provided that quality, learning is the result.
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So, teacher's DO share responsibility for passing their students.
Teachers have a responsibility to teach in a way that their students can learn from. They don't have a responsibility to force the students to learn; the stupid and determinedly lazy should fail.
And some students fail for other reasons. Mental health problems are a thing, unfortunately, and often start to really rear their heads at university.
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teach in a way that their students can learn from
No, teach in a way that an average cross-section of students can demonstrate an average result of learning.
Note: I also disagree with courses and teachers that have too high of a GPA for their classes.
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No, teach in a way that an average cross-section of students can demonstrate an average result of learning.
You're not teaching an average cross-section of students. You're teaching a particular group of (mostly) young adults who are a bit brighter than average because they've demonstrated some willingness to come and learn.
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No, teach in a way that an average cross-section of students can demonstrate an average result of learning.
There are too many factors in play to ensure this. For example, the teacher cannot control how prepared the students are.
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For example, the teacher cannot control how prepared the students are.
That's what prerequisites are for.
Yes, you can ensure this. Otherwise the teacher profession is useless.
If there's no way to falsifiable judge a teacher's results, then there's no way to ensure that the university is performing its job, or producing anything of value at all.
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You're teaching a particular group of (mostly) young adults who are a bit brighter than average
Those students should still produce a normal distribution of results.
If the class is loaded with top performers, then you adjust the challenge of the class, so that you get a normal distribution of grades (over the course of several classes). Deviation either way, is a cause for concern.
The results of your career of grading should result in a normal distribution.
Again, one class full of duds is not an indicator of a problem, consistently failing a large portion of students, or consistently handing out a majority of 4.0s, is a problem.
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That's what prerequisites are for.
Yes, you can ensure this. Otherwise the teacher profession is useless.
If there's no way to falsifiable judge a teacher's results, then there's no way to ensure that the university is performing its job, or producing anything of value at all.
True story:
Someone building a teacher evaluation web-based product contacted me to help him. I had teaching experience, web programming knowledge, and I had a strong statistics background. I was excited to join the project to build something that could help improve education.
The team came up with a bunch of ideas for product features. These ideas were run by prospective customers. No university would pay for any product that had any features that gave honest feedback about teacher performance. They only wanted the features that showed inflated results. I decided that my skills weren't going to be useful to the team and parted ways with them.
BTW, the product has been successful and is used for evaluations for more than a million US students every year.
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Right; and sometimes a guy falling out of an airplane lands on a soft awning above the pillows and kittens warehouse. That doesn't mean it's a good idea to jump out of an airplane.
I'm not sure the kittens would be too happy about a developer landing on them at near terminal velocity.
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When the market downturned in '09, I watched a documentary showing a large amount of ivy league students complaining that they won't get their guaranteed middle management position on graduating.
I then wondered, I thought this school guaranteed quality, not entitlement.
I'm smarter than these fools.
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Software PE now exists. This link implies that at least ten people have attainted the certification. So far, it seems nobody cares about it.
One big problem with that is if the certifications are tied to a particular technology, they would quickly become obsolete. Then we'd have a bunch of people who are certified in ASP.NET 3.5, SQL Server 2008, etc. If any of these were to catch on, it certainly would be like selling picks and shovels during the Gold Rush for those in charge of certification, though.
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I then wondered, I thought this school guaranteed quality, not entitlement.
The funny thing is that the latter is usually solved for most college students by a weeder course where the class average is around 30% on exams. It's certainly better to have the harsh lesson in humility early on.
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One big problem with that is if the certifications are tied to a particular technology
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Are not exhaustive.
Reading tl;dr certainly exhausts me.
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Wow, that's surprisingly comprehensive and architecture-agnostic.
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coders
...
rock star developerIf by "you" you mean the royal you and not "me."
Also, I always felt that the "rock star" descriptor was odd as well. Considering it is describing an individual with intellectual qualities completely opposite those of the traditional rock star.
I would like to point out that this is not as true as you seem to think it is
I sit corrected. I was mainly pulling from interactions I had with 2 other engineers (1 civil, 1 EE) who put a high value on the PE certification. Thanks for the additional information.
Also I flagged for whoosh, it was pretty obvious
I don't know what you are on about. I was replying to the whole thread in general and not any particular post, whether serious or satirical. And considering I wrote about 1000 words, I'd appreciate you pointing out the exact whoosh.
Also, people confuse "computer SCIENCE" with practical Application Development.
They don't confuse it. It's just poorly defined to begin with. Different universities award the a CS degree for different disciplines of CS (embedded, low-level, image processing, application, gaming, main frame, theoretical, etc.). Discussing and defining the different disciplines could be the subject of a whole other topic by itself.
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Discussing and defining the different disciplines could be the subject of a whole other topic by itself.
Agreed. IMHO, there are few colleges that teach computer science at all [note the differentiation between college and university, there are actually a few really good degree tracks out there]
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differentiation between college and university
In what country? In the US, from what I can tell, that's a fairly meaningless distinction as any educational institution can call themselves a college or a university with no implications as to the quality of their content.
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In what country?
In the UK, there's a real difference. Universities are normally older institutions, and offer degrees that are, if anything, biased towards academia. Colleges, on the other hand, tend not to give degrees, but focus more on vocational qualifications. Having said that, there is a fair amount of overlap.
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Sorry, whoosh wasn't directed to you. I should have made that clear.
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I thought that might have been the case, but with a reply to me, a quote of me, and no clear direct object, I assumed the worst.
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In the UK, there's a real difference. Universities are normally older institutions, and offer degrees that are, if anything, biased towards academia. Colleges, on the other hand, tend not to give degrees, but focus more on vocational qualifications.
In the US, Boston College is a university.
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Some of those problems can be described as "making programming itself better", things like designing new programming languages are tools-- and maybe that's what "computer science" should be.
QFT -- that's what CS really is. It's about the design and construction of the infrastructure that allows you and I to apply the computer to the problem domains we face. Algorithms, data structures, databases, parsing techniques, language implementation, computability and complexity -- that's CS, and rather distinct from programming to deal with a specific problem domain.Statistics, for example, is recognized to be useful by many different fields. Statistics lives in the Math department, but there's no such thing as a 4-year degree in Statistics
There are, but these are for dedicated statisticians -- often ones developing tools that the psych and econ majors
useabuse. (Statistics abuse is a whole another :WTF:, but I won't go there right now.)I have heard from colleagues in other countries where the students basically see it as they are paying to get passed, so if a course has less than 85% pass through rate the teachers have to explain themselves to the vice chancellor. This does not foster a quality minded attitude.
Yeah, that hits the nail on the head.We all speak from our own experience, and we have teachers who went to school in order to become teachers and spent little to no time in the real world solving real problems. That is how you end up with teachers who teach as though they are preparing students to become teachers. We need teachers with real world experience if you want to save that aspect of the educational system.
QFT -- the best professors I had were those who had industry background before going into teaching.Business focused masteries promote coding to cost and budget. Those skills are masteries, and are very necessary.
There's a big difference between asking someone qualified in the field what they need to do the task at hand properly and then budgeting accordingly, and setting a near-arbitrary budget target and expecting the software developers to do whatever it takes to meet it.Electrician analogy: the former is collecting several bids from licensed electricians and reviewing them in order to set a budget for getting your house rewired. The latter is telling an electrician "rewire my house for $300". Which do you think is going to produce better results?
QFT. That's the biggest problem I have with Blakey's assertion that programming should be so simple that anyone can do it. Some people just don't think logically.
QFT. Some folks simply cannot see a computer as anything besides a magic box with blinky lights on the front.
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Water, air, fire, dirt. Fuckin' pointers: how do they work?
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explain exactly how the computer works and have none of them be able to describe it down to the transistor level.
That's my field, and even I wouldn't be able to do that. Transistor-level stuff I could explain competently, but there's higher-level stuff — cache coherency, address translation in legacy<->PCIe<->CPU bus bridges, branch prediction, FP calculations — that I, at best, only semi-understand because I haven't dealt directly with those thing, or have but years ago.
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That's my field, and even I wouldn't be able to do that. Transistor-level stuff I could explain competently, but there's higher-level stuff — cache coherency, address translation in legacy<->PCIe<->CPU bus bridges, branch prediction, FP calculations — that I, at best, only semi-understand because I haven't dealt directly with those thing, or have but years ago.
The transistor-level stuff is EE. The other things you mention are what I'd characterise as CE (computer engineering), and then there's the stuff I mostly do (SE, which can be sub-divided further because there's a very big difference between writing different types of applications). There's also the stuff to do with engineering of storage devices, which tends to be very focussed towards strange physics and which makes my brain boggle. For example…
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I took the EIT exam my senior year in college and the only extra work I had to do was a few days of studying and an 8-hour exam. In order to get a PE, all that was left was four years of experience and another exam.
Ok, you know more about that than I do, since I never took the EIT exam. I would assume that the fees for taking the exams are fairly substantial, at least from the POV of a student or junior engineer. I would also consider four years a long time, but since one isn't really doing anything other than the work one would be doing anyway, it's fair to say it isn't significant.
However, going through the process, whether long and expensive, or not, would have been absolutely useless to my career. That was my main point, and I think it's still valid.
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interactions I had with 2 other engineers (1 civil, 1 EE) who put a high value on the PE certification.
There may be other areas of EE (e.g., designing power plants) where the certification is useful. I don't know; that's not what I do. Designing computers and other low-power digital devices, it's not valuable. Nor, AFAIK, is it valuable for small-scale ME stuff like designing, say, home appliances or the case your computer is in.
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In the US, there are:
- Universities, which AIUI basically means they award post-grad degrees (Masters, maybe Doctorate, maybe not — mine only went up to Masters) and usually do some research as well as teaching.
- Colleges award Baccalaureate degrees, and usually focus on teaching rather than research.
- Community Colleges award 2-year Associate degrees, but not everyone who attends one seeks a degree. They are often used as a low-cost way of satisfying general education requirements before transferring to a 4-year college or university. They are open to anyone without enrolling in a degree program, and also generally have vocational and personal enrichment as well as academic classes.
- Commercial, for-profit colleges may award degrees or merely vocational certification, but they are not usually accredited, and the degrees are not highly regarded. Some are legitimate; some are diploma mills.
At least that's my understanding of how the terms are used in the US.
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There may be other areas of EE (e.g., designing power plants) where the certification is useful. I don't know; that's not what I do. Designing computers and other low-power digital devices, it's not valuable.
Oh, that reminds me...
If I wanted to start a business myself right now, by our classification I am allowed to design and produce computer hardware. I am, however, not allowed to install that hardware into an actual machine.
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QFT. Some folks simply cannot see a computer as anything besides a magic box with blinky lights on the front.
QTQFTFT
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The transistor-level stuff is EE. The other things you mention are what I'd characterise as CE (computer engineering)
The other things are done in HW, and I have had to deal with them as a EE when I was working at Intel. (And I never really understood them because the one guy on the project who did understand what the HW was supposed to be doing was too busy to give me more than about 5 min/week of explanation of what I needed to know to test the HW, but that is a multi-faceted WTF that is partially my fault for not escalating when I needed to.)
BTW, as a digital EE, I almost never deal with HW at the transistor level. I sometimes have to deal with AND and OR gates, but mostly it is at an abstracted register-transfer level. 99% of my work is with a SW model of the HW, not with actual silicon.
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BTW, as a digital EE, I almost never deal with HW at the transistor level.
I believe we've got a few people who work at the transistor level in our CPU-design research team still, as we do crazy things like studying non-standard RTL blocks, but most of that group are no lower than at the RTL. (I used to build tools for them, many years ago.)
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I believe we've got a few people who work at the transistor level in our CPU-design research team still, as we do crazy things like studying non-standard RTL blocks
There are good reasons to work at the transistor level, but none of them apply to what I do. People who design the AND gates and OR gates and D flip-flops and stuff you get when you synthesize the RTL have to work with transistors, and the company I work for does a lot of analog stuff; the analog guys are all about transistors, resistors and capacitors.
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Perhaps categorically this is correct, but it does not necessarily hold for the nomenclature institutions use. The "commercial" group being the most usual violator of this structure. My school (for-profit) was called a university, although categorically it fit better in the college group. There are various other examples caused by historical or marketing reasons (university just sounds cooler!).
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Universities often contain organizations that go by the name College: College of Arts and Science, College of Business, etc.
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Answering a set of only partially related discussion threads at once.
Those students should still produce a normal distribution of results.
... Over all students ever taken that subject from the Dawn of Time to the big luau at the end of the universe, yes.
If the class is loaded with top performers, then you adjust the challenge of the class, so that you get a normal distribution of grades (over the course of several classes). Deviation either way, is a cause for concern.
No. I adjust the challenge so they may learn something, but the criteria for passing remains the same; see above.
That's what prerequisites are for.
Yes, you can ensure this. Otherwise the teacher profession is useless.
Assuming the students have studied in the same education system before they come to your course. If they have not, e.g. coming from a south east asian country, this is nigh on impossible. What I can do is to refer them to the prerequisites and tell them to go home and study up, or they won't understand what I am talking about. What I won't do, despite university pressure to the contrary, is reduce the contents of my course to repeat things they explicitly ought to know before entering my course. Guess what this does to the pass rate?
If you think your only responsibility is to expose students to information, then I have a library that's vastly superior to you for that purpose.
Please use it. My lectures won't regurgitate that anyway. Should you wish to discuss some aspect of it, or connect it to experience or research, you know how to contact me (or visit my lectures). Should you wish to get university credits for what you have learnt, you know how to contact me, so we may stitch together a minimum effort for you that fits into the university's moulds.
Herein lies the core of the poodle: If you are smart enough to find and synthesis information on your own, my job is to get the hell out of your way. If you need more assistance, I can provide a guided path throughout the material. If your ambition is to get university credits, I will test you and uphold certain quality standards. Nothing of this even touches upon your actual learning.
Given this, I maintain that I do not share responsibility for your learning; that is your job. If I am satisfied that I am not actively getting in your or the other students' way, I will accept a low pass through rate on my course. If the university gives me more resources, I can of course do more to help the students.
I'll give you one example. We have an advanced level software architecture course.For a number of years it remained the same (which is a
in itself but another story). Suddenly from one year to the next, the pass through rate dropped from 80% to 25%. All things remained constant. Since then, I have been involved in the course an given all/some/none of the lectures, I have been involved in marking all/some/none of the assignments, and we have redesigned the course from the ground up thrice. Pass through rate remains around 25%. Is this then the fault of the teachers, the students, the students' attitude towards the course, or the preparation by the education system of the students before this course?
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Suddenly from one year to the next, the pass through rate dropped from 80% to 25%. All things remained constant.
Were there changes to the entry requirements for that cohort? That sort of thing can have a fundamental affect on just how well people do (or rather on how well prepared they are for the kind of learning experience a university can offer). We're dealing with all this by simply increasing the entry requirements for undergraduate courses, and the harder we make it to get in, the more applications we get (which does let us be very picky).
For the courses I've been involved with (admittedly postgraduate courses) the criteria for success have been (a) have they learned what we set out to teach them, and (b) can they demonstrate that they can use what we've taught to do interesting things with them? If a student can do those, they'll do well. (We assume they'll use the library and the internet, and my coursework explicitly tells them that we'll give them marks for finding something relevant and useful to use. I'm sometimes an evil swine, though scrupulously fair.
)
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Is this then the fault of the teachers, the students, the students' attitude towards the course, or the preparation by the education system of the students before this course?
I feel that you've left out some of the most interesting bits here. It's impossible for me to discern the answer from another continent. Surely you have a theory about what happened?
the core of the poodle
I LOL'd at this phrase. TYL: I never read Faust.
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Were there changes to the entry requirements for that cohort?
Surely you have a theory about what happened?
Yes, I just ran out of steam this morning. There were a number of coinciding changes.
One, we hit the facebook generation coming out of high school; this is a generation who has been taught since childhood that whatever they do is great, and if something goes wrong is Never Their Fault. To bite down and study is simply not their MO; instead they negotiate. When it comes to quality criteria, I don't.
One point five: These students have been pampered with before, to the extent that they are no longer used to working independently. This is how they were treated in high school, and in order to maintain acceptable pass rates they were treated in the same way in their earlier univ. courses. Once they hit a real univ. course, they are so surprised that they do not cope well with the change. Instead they start to negotiate.
Two, the number of students from south east asia increased. Many of these do not have (because of national fuckups in grade equivalences) sufficient english skills. They are also less technically savvy (because of similar fuckups), and I require them to actually know and apply their fluffy-knowledge and develop a working software architecture/system.
Three, the course was made mandatory.
Four, the course was widened to also be mandatory for games development students who simply did not see why they had to think about architectures at all. We round-robin through a number of different systems in the assignments (a new one for each year). Some of these are games, but most are not; instead focusing on software-intensive systems with many collaborating hardware units, sensors, and actuators.
... and again I have to leave half a story untold; time to pick up my kids at school/kindergarten. Sorry.
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Three, the course was made mandatory.
Ah, this sounds most likely the cause of the abruptness. The other stuff sounds obvious but gradual. It was the sudden (and so far permanent) shift that really stuck out to me.
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One, we hit the facebook generation coming out of high school; this is a generation who has been taught since childhood that whatever they do is great, and if something goes wrong is Never Their Fault. To bite down and study is simply not their MO; instead they negotiate. When it comes to quality criteria, I don't.
Oh hey look, an "old man yells at clouds" right here on our very own forum.
“Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”
- Socrates
In a related note, it seriously saddens me that:
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A person with your utter lack of self-reflection is teaching students
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When you type a line beginning with a dash in Discourse now, it draws a bullet instead of a dash. WTF? Did it always do that?
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So you rant about the "facebook generation"... then turn around and tell us that your school forced a bunch of people who don't give a crap about the subject matter to take the course when previously it was optional and thus attracted only people who gave a crap.
Clearly facebook is to blame for the lack of effort here.
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Clearly facebook is to blame for the lack of effort here.
I don't understand this criticism. He gave several reasons there that combined to give the effect.
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So if I tell you that it was cold today because it's winter and also because of aliens, clearly those two aspects combined to give the effect of being cold?
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So if I tell you that it was cold today because it's winter and also because of aliens, clearly those two aspects combined to give the effect of being cold?
I can't see how this is a fair representation of what happened here.
Giant magnetoresistance - Wikipedia
