On Saturday, 11 June 2016 at 12:19:52 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
LOL. 10x that would be cheap in the US, and I don't think that your average school will let folks sit in on courses (though some will). For your average college in the US, I would only expect anyone to take classes if they're actually working towards a degree, though I'm sure that there are exceptions in some places.
I remember that we sometimes had older programmers taking some courses, maybe to ge a degree? But not often. The $100/semester fee isn't for tuition though, it is for student activities/facilities, paper copies etc. Tuition is free.
It works better when the school itself is really hard to get into. For instance, my dad went to MIT, and according to him, you usually don't have much of a need for weeder courses there, because it was already hard enough to get into the school that folks who can't hack it won't even be there - and it's an engineering school, so you're typically going to get very smart, well-prepared students who want to do engineering.
It sorts itself out at higher levels, although I once had a project group at the master level that came to the hallway outside my office to get help, and it eventually dawned on me that none of the three boys knew that they should end sentences with ";"... I couldn't help laughing... and I kinda felt bad about it, but they laughed too, so I guess it was ok. I was so totally unprepared for that kind of problem at a master level course. I assume they came from some other field, as it was a web-oriented course.
These things with uneven knowledge levels are more of a problem in "hip" project oriented courses, not so much in the courses that are proper compsci and are based on individual final exams. It kinda work out ok as long as students of the same level go on the same group, but it creates a lot of friction if you get a mixed group where the better students feel the other ones are freeloaders.
You freqeuntly either end up with the school trying to weed out a lot of folks up front by having very hard beginning courses or making their beginning classes easy in an attempt to make it so that everyone has a chance, though I think that tends to just delay the inevitable for many students.
Yep, exactly, but the problem was that the introduction course in programming was required by other fields such as getting a master in bio-chemistry or so. That didn't go very well when the lecturer once came up with a "clever exam" where you got stuck if you didn't master the first task. So 40% failed on their final exam, 200 angry students? That would've made me feel bad. After that they softened the tasks a bit... making failure harder.
In the math department they had one more narrow calculus course for those who wanted to specialise in math and a broader more pragmatic calculus course for those who were more to use math as an applied tool in other fields. Probably a better solution.
to be able to program. So, I agree that it would be nice if there were some sort of aptitude test up front that at least indicated whether you were likely have a very hard time with programming. But I don't think that I've ever heard of any schools doing anything like that (though obviously, some could be, and I just haven't heard of it). And I don't know how you would even go about making such a test, though I expect that there are computer science professors out there who would.
Well, I don't know. I guess having average or above in math would work out. Not that you have to know math, but general problem solving. I noticed that people from other fields that was working on their master picked up programming faster, perhaps because they had acquired skills in structuring and problem solving.
Then again, pure theoretical topics kill motivation for me. Like, I could never find any interest in solving tricky integrals analytically as it seemed like a pointless exercise. And to be honest, I've never found the need to do it. But as you said, some topics become more meaningful later in life and I'd probably put more energy into topics like program verification and combinatorics today than I did in my youth.
