11–20 of 51 posts
The idea that Scaz is working with 25 students on projects is a bit concerning. How can you give the necessary attention to any student, your own work, and any classes you teach when spreading yourself that thin?
I'm a CS student at the University of Washington. We do something [that I consider] interesting here to staff TAs for courses, which is hire undergraduate teaching assistants. Generally, a course will have one head TA who is a grad student, and multiple undergraduate TAs. I've TA'd for a while as an undergraduate, and it's been a really great experience for my career. Especially in the intro courses and lower level c…
However, even that hasn't completely met the needs of the current enrollment deluge: I'm glad I got my requirements out of the way early on, because there are an absurd number of CS enrollments. They recently capped one of the major tracks (the BA) because there were simply too many students.
Edit: Undergraduate at UVA. Also, I think undergrads are possibly a better option than grad students: since we have actually taken the course, unlike most grad students.
I'm a CS student at the University of Washington. We do something [that I consider] interesting here to staff TAs for courses, which is hire undergraduate teaching assistants. Generally, a course will have one head TA who is a grad student, and multiple undergraduate TAs. I've TA'd for a while as an undergraduate, and it's been a really great experience for my career. Especially in the intro courses and lower level c…
In my opinion, this whole issue has arisen because there is confusion about what "computer science" should be at a university. Theoretical computer science that professors do is a world away from the casual HTML/CSS development that many non-CS-majors want to dabble in after watching The Social Network. I think an excellent university should have instruction in both, and enough professors to strongly support the latter.
The Yale CS department, with good reason, does not want Yale to become a "Java school". (good background on the topic: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchool...). They want to focus on CS fundamentals, algorithms, and UNIX skills, which are timeless skills that can serve as a foundation for a career in computer science. This especially makes sense given the strength of the theoretical component of Yale's CS department, both now and historically. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Perlis) (http://www.macfound.org/fellows/877/)
But the university also needs to realize that having a more casual computer science class for non-majors, like Harvard's CS50, is an essential part of offering a liberal arts education in the modern world. There's a lot of student spirit and initiative here, such as awesome student-taught web dev courses (http://hackyale.com/) and student-organized talks and hackathons, but the university itself seems to be playing catch-up.
I'm a CS student at the University of Washington. We do something [that I consider] interesting here to staff TAs for courses, which is hire undergraduate teaching assistants. Generally, a course will have one head TA who is a grad student, and multiple undergraduate TAs. I've TA'd for a while as an undergraduate, and it's been a really great experience for my career. Especially in the intro courses and lower level c…
CS enrollment numbers are way up in every school. Yale is complaining about 200... at Princeton our intro course has over 500. At Stanford almost every undergrad takes a CS course at some point. We have a good number of lecturers in addition to tenure-track faculty members (at Princeton CS). They are extremely good and greatly decrease our load, so we haven't faced burnout so far. That said, enrollment was up so shar…
http://www.stanforddaily.com/2012/10/04/cs106a-enrollment-re...
Ugh this sounds familiar. Back in 2008-2010 I was one of two sitting students on the Computer Science curriculum committee at Rensselaer Polytechnic University (RPI). Three topics were always present: 1. What do we do about kids who come in knowing inadequate math and how does this keep happening? 2. Should we consider switching out C/C++ as the default for Java as the default. (The answer to this was almost always n…
I'm a CS student at the University of Washington. We do something [that I consider] interesting here to staff TAs for courses, which is hire undergraduate teaching assistants. Generally, a course will have one head TA who is a grad student, and multiple undergraduate TAs. I've TA'd for a while as an undergraduate, and it's been a really great experience for my career. Especially in the intro courses and lower level c…
I've been a TA for three years now, and I've probably gotten more from it than from my actual classes. And because we see what the class needs to teach, as well as what the class has taught in the past, we're actually a lot better (IMHO) than grad students (and even many professors) at figuring out how to change the course to push students further.
As our professor last year put it: "I am the Pope of CS17. The head TAs are the Roman Curia, the TAs are the dedicated priests, and the students are the Faithful."
http://teachingintrotocs.blogspot.com/2011/09/teaching-with-...
~4-6% every 3 years according to http://oir.yale.edu/node/108/attachment
Apparently that gets spent on all kinds of things, just not the actual education the students need. At >30k a year you could really expect that they would hire enough real teachers.