Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

The school I went to originally had a 60% fail rate with their computer science program. The first class was huge, 80 students to 1 teacher. This was the first time most of the students did any programming at all. To fix, this they changed the course to the class room being "theory". Which mostly meant learning terms (What is an Int, String, etc). The second half of the class was a "lab with paired programming". Those who knew how to program going in would carry those who didn't. Many students couldn't even type at a reasonable speed. If you and your pair had no idea how to complete the assignment, the TA would basically do it for you. This brought the fail rate in line with other classes. This continued for the rest of their college career. You could get through doing zero solo programming.

The result was seniors who don't know about inheritance. The only thing they know is "public void someName()". But, because they don't have good OO practices, it ends up just being 1 program with everything in the main method.

These are the students who don't have technical training. Many came in because "Computers are the future.", "I have a friend making good money doing this.", and "everything is already written I just need to google."



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: