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Ah, you fell for the trap. Notice how the course description you link is hosted on purdueglobal.edu? Purdue Global (formerly Kaplan) is totally unrelated to the main campus. Basically they took a garbage online college and slapped the Purdue name on it. The “real” Purdue of course has an MS in CS program, though AFAIK it’s only full-time and in-person.
related but unrelated: does anyone have experience going back for a PhD/transitioning into academia after years in industry? I can't find many people who've done it, most of the professors and grad students I've ever spoken to either ended up working at a lab as their "industry" work or just went straight to grad school.
Disclaimer: never been in industry, but knows several people (PhD students, professors) who were in industry once
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That's quite amazing! For Open Classroom s, my impression is that it is more like Coursera or Udacity and not a "real" degree? I also recall the same thing with Structuralia and the Titulo Propio
It depends on the programme you study. Structuralia hands out mostly EQF 7, but backed by a number of Spanish universities that are wholly recognized by the government, and also several British universities. There may be other universities and countries they are working with, but those are the only ones I know of. These are "Master's diplomas", for all intents a Master's degree without thesis, I have a couple of thos…
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I learned unit testing early at UCDavis. My professor would take in assignments via ssh, run them, if it failed, it would "echo F" for grade.
That's how I do it, too. I give students a script which compiles their code with the test code (which is provided to them, if they want to look at it) and then runs it inside GDB (in case it segfaults or throws an exception). All of the tests are documented and, on failure, print an error message describing what was expected, what was actually returned, and include a URL linking to a fuller description of what might…
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I have a more mixed experience with the OMSCS. Overall it's a good program, and if the choice is between Udemy or OMSCS then it wins hands down. For me the central issue is online vs. in-person. Education is an interactive experience, the value of a good professor and classmates is helping to identify issues when you are stuck and nudge you just enough for you to connect the dots. As an undergraduate I liked attendin…
I am also currently in OMSCS. One relatively recent change is that students actively use the slack or discord rooms for the course. I actually found the interactive discussion to be more frequent then my (in-person) undergrad
Slack and other conferencing tools are game changers. People getting used to these tools is one silver lining to the pandemic.
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So teach them the importance of testing, code review, and design documents. As someone who graduated 15 years ago, I feel like the only two truly useful things I got out of my CS degree were 1) lots of practice writing code and 2) my algorithms and data structures class. The latter was useful in exactly the way you hope for, but it was the only such class.
I learned unit testing early at UCDavis. My professor would take in assignments via ssh, run them, if it failed, it would "echo F" for grade.
That said, I spent a lot of time building extracurricular websites in my spare time, which was also a huge leg up in my future career.
For the opposite perspective: "The case against CS master’s degrees" [1] [1] https://ozwrites.com/masters/
> In my experience, an MS degree has been one of the strongest indicators of poor technical interview performance. Oouf. Felt that one (and I don't even have a MS degree).
I'll share a comment that I made when I read that article: please note _technical interview performance_. Not job performance. Because a MS may not teach you leetcode-style algorithms as a BS. Spoiler: OMSCS does, with graduate algorithms, which is in fact quite pointless if you're a mid career software engineer, but useful if you're a career switcher.
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I agree with some of the premise —- university education doesn’t focus on preparation for specific vocational skills. But you could say the same about high school. It doesn’t follow that reading writing and algebra are bad vocational investments, in fact the opposite because they support many possible vocations. As a CS professor, my goal is to push students to rewire their brains in ways that are better and more eff…
So teach them the importance of testing, code review, and design documents. As someone who graduated 15 years ago, I feel like the only two truly useful things I got out of my CS degree were 1) lots of practice writing code and 2) my algorithms and data structures class. The latter was useful in exactly the way you hope for, but it was the only such class.
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It depends on the programme you study. Structuralia hands out mostly EQF 7, but backed by a number of Spanish universities that are wholly recognized by the government, and also several British universities. There may be other universities and countries they are working with, but those are the only ones I know of. These are "Master's diplomas", for all intents a Master's degree without thesis, I have a couple of thos…
Thank you for your reply. That's quite impressive, I've rarely ever come across someone who has studied at that many schools across so many continents! Do any of the programs you've studied at offer Bachelors in CS or Linguistics? That's what I would need first, unless there is a program to go straight through to the Master's.
You can earn an entire Bachelor's by testing out and/or doing prior learning assessements (I've thought about that if I could find a subject that interested me). PLA acceptance is far more prevalent in Europe than in the US, though Thomas Edison in US does let you test out or do PLA for the entire degree if you are capable of it. I'll point out that doing PLA is not a walk in the park. I've done a couple of prior learning assessments where I felt I knew the class subject really well - it was probably more work to do the assessment (lots of writing and gathering of research notes and documentation) than it would have been to just finish up the prescribed projects.
I am no expert in any of this, and I strongly recommend you do your own research.