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Sender: "Team Ada: Ada Advocacy Issues (83 & 95)" <[log in to unmask]>
X-To: Michael Feldman <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 13:28:45 -0600
Reply-To: John McCormick <[log in to unmask]>
From: John McCormick <[log in to unmask]>
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I'll add a data point to counter Ron Oliver's claims that the general CS
grad is a hacker rather than an engineer.  In a recent this Fall between my
University President and a CEO of a major avionics company, the CEO stated
that the CS grads coming out of our program did better at developing
software than that those they hired from engineering programs.  Of course,
they don't hire any of our C (GPA not programming language) students.

I will agree with Ron that the vast majority of CS profs teach hacking.  In
fact we have just revamped our freshman courses and replaced the software
engineering with Ada emphasis to software hacking with OO and Java.
Interesting is that the retention rate with the hacking approach has been
only half of that with the SE approach.  So my upper division courses are
getting a lot smaller.

John

At 11:51 AM 12/5/2002 -0500, Michael Feldman wrote:
>Over the years I've had great difficulty getting people who make
>these generalizations to provide specific examples of CS programs
>that they've found to be notably poor, or good, at providing grads
>who meet their expectations. John and others, here's a challenge:
>give me some specifics, publicly or privately.
>
>Let's get beyond the generalizations.
>
>Please discuss the *recent* graduates you've dealt with; telling
>me about your own experiences 15 or 20 years ago won't tell me much
>about the current state of things.
>
>Yours truly,
>
>Michael Feldman



-------------------------------------------------------
John W. McCormick                [log in to unmask]
Computer Science Department
University of Northern Iowa        voice (319) 273-6056
Cedar Falls, IA 50614-0507       fax (319) 273-7123
http://www.cs.uni.edu/~mccormic/

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