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Mist

Mist

REEEEeyore
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Celestein_sl said:
As a professional CS educator, I'd agree that the mixed nature of the introduction classes is actually a serious problem. Roughly half my intro students are basically completely new and and the rest have a mixed backgrounds of being hobbyist programmers.

I also frequently teach another course, which is an introduction course to programming required by communications majors(and different than the CS one), and it's a world of difference. In that class, virtually everyone is starting at ground zero, and it makes my lesson plans much easier, more consistent, and I can say with great confidence that the people who take the non-CS intro course, finish further ahead of the non-programmers who take the regular CS introduction course. Unrelated but I'm actually writing a book that targets this audience, since it's pretty under-served ("Introduction to CS for Reluctant Programmers").

The problem basically boils down to this, in the first class, you as an educator have to play a balancing act. You can't outpace the beginners, but you can't go slow enough to bore to death the hobbyists. If you go too far in either direction, roughly 1/3 of the class will just bomb out because their needs are not being met(and that reflects badly on you, the professor).

I've done it enough times that I would say there is no way to properly balance this dilemma. I've been advocating for awhile that we should split our first 6 introduction sequence into two tracks not THAT dissimilar to what that university is trying. Except that I think they should be separate tracks that just meet further into the program, and not segregation inside of the existing classes.
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GET OUT OF HERE WITH YOUR FACTS AND REAL LIFE EXPERIENCE.
 
Mario Speedwagon

Mario Speedwagon

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Mist_sl said:
130+ is 2.7% of the population. The fact that smart people are rare is EXACTLY why prejudice and discrimination are bad. Any time an otherwise especially talented person (even if it's not raw IQ) gets discouraged from contributing because of something as inane as racism or sexism or whatever, all of society loses out on that person's potential contribution.
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I completely agree. Policies that favor certain individuals based on their gender or race instead of their competence are bad. We don't need more women in tech. We need more smart people.
 
Seananigans

Seananigans

Honorary Shit-PhD
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Dr. Mario Speedwagon_sl said:
I completely agree. Policies that favor certain individuals based on their gender or race instead of their competence are bad. We don't need more women in tech. We need more smart people.
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But then if you just take "smart people," the distribution won't exactly mirror the sex/race distribution of America. OH GOD WHAT WILL WE DO?
 
Mist

Mist

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Dr. Mario Speedwagon_sl said:
I completely agree. Policies that favor certain individuals based on their gender or race instead of their competence are bad. We don't need more women in tech. We need more smart people.
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And this The Whiteboy Delusion; that anything that encourages other people is somehow discouraging or even disadvantaging white males. That any time there's anything in society that doesn't specifically revolve around the needs of white males, it's actively discriminating against white males.

Unfortunately for them, there's absolutely no fucking evidence to support these claims. White males already have all the encouraging they need, that they'll be, on average, paid significantly more and promoted significantly more often than their peers in nearly every field that matters.
 
Mist

Mist

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Seananigans_sl said:
But then if you just take "smart people," the distribution won't exactly mirror the sex/race distribution of America. OH GOD WHAT WILL WE DO?
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You think white guys and Asians have a monopoly on intelligence? The 115-145 IQ range is pretty evenly distributed across sex and race. At the 145+ range it does slightly favor men, but at that point we're talking about so few people that it doesn't really matter. There are no fields that are exclusive to people in that range, and 145+ IQ is actually strongly correlated with being maladaptive, unable to cope with normal conventions, etc.
 
Mist

Mist

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CS students actually cheat less than normal. Business and finance majors cheat the most. It's also like it's a metaphor or something.
 
Mario Speedwagon

Mario Speedwagon

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Mist_sl said:
And this The Whiteboy Delusion; that anything that encourages other people is somehow discouraging or even disadvantaging white males. That any time there's anything in society that doesn't specifically revolve around the needs of white males, it's actively discriminating against white males.

Unfortunately for them, there's absolutely no fucking evidence to support these claims. White males already have all the encouraging they need, that they'll be, on average, paid significantly more and promoted significantly more often than their peers in nearly every field that matters.
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I mean that's not what I said at all but okay champ.
 
Cad

Cad

scientia potentia est
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Dr. Mario Speedwagon_sl said:
I mean that's what I said at all but okay champ.
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The subtext of what she said is that if you favor competence, you're favoring white men, thus implying white men are more competent. Since all you said was competence, and she came back with "favoring white men is BS"... thats got to be what she's saying. Unbelievable, but seems to be true.
 
Mist

Mist

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That's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is that people are unlikely to participate in a system that appears to be rigged against them right from the start. But any amount of encouragement or incentive to get those people to attempt to participate is seen as 'reverse discrimination' by white males, even though it's not actually doing anything to disincentivise them.

I brought it up 150 pages or so ago, none of you would want to play an MMO that appeared horribly unbalanced from level one on. And the people who were advantaged from level one would attempt to defend those imbalances to the death.
 
Tanoomba

Tanoomba

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Dr. Mario Speedwagon_sl said:
I completely agree. Policies that favor certain individuals based on their gender or race instead of their competence are bad. We don't need more women in tech. We need more smart people.
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So, if you getmore peoplein tech (regardless of race or gender), by default you'll be getting more smart people, right? I mean, it's not like we have any reason to believe anybody that would otherwise have been interested in the program suddenly wouldn't be because of the changes made. The changes allowed for people who might have been either intimidated or simply uninterested in the program to see it as welcoming and interesting. This, in turn, creates motivated students who are better able to reach their own potential.

The policies don't "favor certain individuals based on their gender or race", they simply create an atmosphere where more people feel welcome than otherwise would have,includingmore smart people. The students are still judged on individual merit and no skilled students are being discriminated against in any way. Why would you assume that, because more women are entering the program, that we wouldn't by default be getting more "smart people"? Sounds pretty sexist to me.
 
Arbitrary

Arbitrary

Tranny Chaser
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Tanoomba_sl said:
So, if you getmore peoplein tech (regardless of race or gender), by default you'll be getting more smart people, right? I mean, it's not like we have any reason to believe anybody that would otherwise have been interested in the program suddenly wouldn't be because of the changes made. The changes allowed for people who might have been either intimidated or simply uninterested in the program to see it as welcoming and interesting. This, in turn, creates motivated students who are better able to reach their own potential.

The policies don't "favor certain individuals based on their gender or race", they simply create an atmosphere where more people feel welcome than otherwise would have,includingmore smart people. The students are still judged on individual merit and no skilled students are being discriminated against in any way. Why would you assume that, because more women are entering the program, that we wouldn't by default be getting more "smart people"? Sounds pretty sexist to me.
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Arbitrary

Arbitrary

Tranny Chaser
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Mist_sl said:
I brought it up 150 pages or so ago, none of you would want to play an MMO that appeared horribly unbalanced from level one on. Andthe people who were advantaged from level onewould attempt to defend those imbalances to the death.
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That's not how that goes. What happened is that the people who slogged through the imbalances and made it to the endgame would then later defend them and be opposed to change. There was not some subset of "advantaged" level 1 players.
 
Lendarios

Lendarios

Trump's Staff
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Mist_sl said:
This. There's a reason some of the best engineering programs use interdisciplinary teams even for high profile engineering and robotics competitions. CMU and Stanford in particular. Frequently, 3 engineers, a psychologist and a biologist build a better robot than a team of just 5 engineers.
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That has nothing to do with gender or race discrimination and more to do with egos. A big part of managing highly intellient individuals is managing their egos and the relationships among themselves. Introducing another element such as race and gender makes it even harder. Your scenario will be more accurate if a team 5 engineers will be constantly over-performed by a team of 2 white male engineer, 2 black man engineer and 1 female white engineer.
 
Lendarios

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Nissir_sl said:
Say you have 10 people working on a project that have very similar backgrounds, chances are they will come up similar solutions to a problem. Have 10 people with varied backgrounds, educations, genders, political views etc. your chances of having a larger set of solutions increases. Same goes with innovation, stagnation of a system is more likely to occur when you have a less diverse system.
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This statement is full of feelings and no substance. The majority of innovation is indeed performed by similar types of people within the same field. Having different educations serve little when u have to solve a technical problem. In fact it will make the other people that are not technical useless.
We are not talking about mundane task, we are talking about highly specialized tasking here.
 
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