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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday November 12 2019, @12:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the insights-into-education dept.

[UPDATE 20191112_223013 UTC: Per original author's request, I hereby note this is an edited excerpt and not an exact quote from the blog post linked below. --martyb]

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Three of the Hundred Falsehoods CS Students Believe

Jan Schauma recently posted a list of one hundred Falsehoods CS Students (Still) Believe Upon Graduating. There is much good fun here, especially for a prof who tries to help CS students get ready for the world, and a fair amount of truth, too. I will limit my brief comments to three items that have been on my mind recently even before reading this list.

18. 'Email' and 'Gmail' are synonymous.

CS grads are users, too, and their use of Gmail, and systems modeled after it, contributes to the truths of modern email: top posting all the time, with never a thought of trimming anything. Two-line messages sitting atop icebergs of text which will never be read again, only stored in the seemingly infinite space given us for free.

38. Employers care about which courses they took.

It's the time of year when students register for spring semester courses, so I've been meeting with a lot of students. (Twice as many as usual, covering for a colleague on sabbatical.) It's interesting to encounter students on both ends of the continuum between not caring at all what courses they take and caring a bit too much. The former are so incurious I wonder how they fell into the major at all. The latter are often more curious but sometimes are captive to the idea that they must, must, must take a specific course, even if it meets at a time they can't attend or is full by the time they register.

90. Two people with a CS degree will have a very similar background and shared experience/knowledge.

This falsehood operates in a similar space to #38, but at the global level I reached at the end of my previous paragraph. Even students who take most of the same courses together will usually end their four years in the program with very different knowledge and experiences.

The complete list is available at www.netmeister.org.


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  • (Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday November 13 2019, @01:09AM (1 child)

    by acid andy (1683) on Wednesday November 13 2019, @01:09AM (#919636) Homepage Journal

    Many of the best professionals learned the trade for fun in their spare time. The degree formalizes that knowledge and puts it into a scientific context. I think people who try to study Computer Science purely to get at the revenue stream and don't have a passion for it will often have a bad time in the workplace if they even make it through the degree. I'm sure there are exceptions, though.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Wednesday November 13 2019, @01:58AM

    by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday November 13 2019, @01:58AM (#919662)

    >The degree formalizes that knowledge and puts it into a scientific context.

    I have to disagree. Yeah, there's some formalization, but where a degree really shines is granting breadth of knowledge. There's plenty of good self-taught programmers out there, but I doubt all that many of them are familiar with big-O notation, graph theory, boolean algebra, etc, etc, etc. (to mention some examples from the first class that springs to mind) All things that are very useful to have in your mental toolbox, but that you probably aren't going to learn organically under your own initiative - they're just not obviously relevant to much until you already know what they are.

    Degrees excel at exposing you to lots of relevant background knowledge, while self-guided learning excels at developing practical knowledge. I'd venture a guess that most really excellent professionals have both.