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Teaching foreign policy majors to code

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Re: Teaching foreign policy majors to code

#4

Post by mingee »

superkuh wrote: post #2

I understand why the teacher in this case hid the coding requirements of the course. His reasoning makes sense. But I'm not sure it was ethical misrepresenting the course even for the students own benefit.

Is it unethical to do something if all parties are happy? Does it only become unethical when a party has been tricked and become unhappy, or is tricking somebody even for their own good unethical? In that case, what would be your definition of ethics?

I don't have a strong stance whether his decision was ethical or not, just interested in seeing your opinion as you seem to be implying that it might not be :P

Re: Teaching foreign policy majors to code

#6

Post by headcanon »

crooked-v wrote: post #3

Starting off with C? Ow. R or Python seem like they'd be much better choices for something students would actually use in the future, given their data analysis tools.

I agree, this doesn't make sense. Python especially strikes the perfect balance between learning programming concepts and being productive almost immediately in real-life. It seems like most of the problems the students experienced were lower-level CS details like types and pointers that didn't directly translate with the kinds of data analysis problems that they were likely be able to apply to their studies.

If they were CS majors I would entertain them learning the lower-level stuff first but not for what they are trying to accomplish.

Re: Teaching foreign policy majors to code

#8

Post by evil-olive »

mingee wrote: post #4
superkuh wrote: post #2

I understand why the teacher in this case hid the coding requirements of the course. His reasoning makes sense. But I'm not sure it was ethical misrepresenting the course even for the students own benefit.

Is it unethical to do something if all parties are happy? Does it only become unethical when a party has been tricked and become unhappy, or is tricking somebody even for their own good unethical? In that case, what would be your definition of ethics? I don't have a strong stance whether his decision was ethical or not, just interested in seeing your opinion as you seem to be implying that it might not be :P

Is it unethical for a professor to lie to their students?

Yes.

Is is still unethical if the professor argues that the lies were for the students' own good?

Yes.

Is it still unethical if, a few months into the course, the professor tells the truth?

Yes.

Is it still unethical if, a few months later, the professor tells the truth and one or more students says "you know, I understand now why you lied to us"?

Yes.

This really isn't a challenging conundrum. The student-teacher relationship is a special one. There are expectations that need to be fulfilled on both sides. One of the most basic ones that can be expected of a teacher is don't lie to your fucking students.

Re: Teaching foreign policy majors to code

#10

Post by natalyarostova »

ummonk wrote: post #5
crooked-v wrote: post #3

Starting off with C? Ow. R or Python seem like they'd be much better choices for something students would actually use in the future, given their data analysis tools.

Or Julia if you want to prepare them for the future.

Yeah, Python will pretty much be deprecated over the next few years./s
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