TITLE: Grades and Verticality
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: August 12, 2006 2:21 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
The next book on my nightstand is
Talking About Leaving:
Why Undergraduates Leave the Sciences,
by Elaine Seymour and Nancy Hewitt. The dean and department
heads in my college have had an ongoing discussion of national
trends in university enrollment in mathematics and the sciences,
because all of our departments with the exception of biology
have seen their number of majors drop in recent years. If we
can understand the issue better, perhaps we can address it.
Are students losing interest in the sciences in college? In
high school? In grade school? Why? One of the common themes
on this blog for the last year or so has been apparent declining
interest in CS among students both at the university and in the
K-12 system. At this point, all I know is that this is a
complex problem with a lot of different components. Figuring
out which components play the largest role, and which ones we
as university faculty and as citizens can affect, is the
challenge.
My net acquaintance Chad Orzel, a physicist, recently commented
on
why they're leaving,
drawing his inspiration from an
Inside Higher Ed piece
of the same name. That article offers four explanations for why
students leave the physical sciences and engineering disciplines:
lower GPAs, weed-out courses, large and impersonal sections, and
"vertical curricula". The last of these refers to the fact that
students in our disciplines often have to "slog" through a bunch
of introductory skills courses before they are ready to do the
intersting work of science.
While Chad teaches at a small private college, my experience here
at a mid-size public university seems to match with his. We don't
have many large sections in computer science at UNI. For a couple
of years, my department experimented with 100-person CS1 sections
as a way to leverage faculty expertise in a particular language
against our large enrollments. (Irony!) But for the most part
our sections have always been 35 or less. I once taught a 53-person
section of our third course (at that time, object-oriented
programming), but that was an aberration. Our students generally
have small sections with plenty of chance to work closely with
the tenure-track faculty who teach them.
We've never had a weed-out course, at least not intentionally.
Many of our students take Calculus and may view that as a weeder,
but my impression from talking to our students is that this is
nothing like the brutal weed-out courses used in many programs
to get enrollments down to a manageable size of sufficient
quality. These days, the closest thing we have to a weed-out
course is our current third course, Data Structures. It certainly
acts as a gatekeeper, but it's mostly a matter of programming
practice; students who apply themselves to the expectations of
the instructor ought to be able to succeed.
The other two issues are problems for us. The average GPA of
a computer science student is almost surely well below the
university average. I haven't seen a list of average GPAs
sorted by department in many years, but the last few times I did
CS and economics seemed to be jostling for the bottom. These
are not disciplines that attract lots and lots of weak students,
so grading practices in the departments must play a big role.
As the Inside Higher Ed article points out, This culture of
grading is common in the natural sciences and the more
quantitative social sciences at most universities. I don't
doubt that many students are dissuaded from pursuing a CS
major by even a B in an intro course. Heck, they get As in
their other courses, so maybe they are better suited for those
majors? And even the ones who realize that this is an illogical
deduction may figure that their lives will simply be easier with
a different major.
I won't speak much of the other problem area for us, because I've
written about it a lot recently. I've never used the word
"vertical" to describe our problem of boring intro courses that
hide or kill the joy of doing computing before students ever get
to see it, but I've certainly written about the issue. Any student
who graduates high school with the ability to read is ready for
a major in history or communication; the same student probably
needs to learn a programming language, learn how to write code,
and figure out a lot of new terminology before being ready to
"go deep" in CS. I think we can do better, but
figuring out how
is a challenge.
I must point out, though, that the sciences are not alone in the
problem of a vertical curriculum. As an undergraduate, I
double-majored in CS and accounting. When I switched from
architecture to CS, I knew that CS was what I wanted to do, but
my parents encouraged me to take a "practical" second major as
insurance. I actually liked accounting just fine, but only
because I saw past all of the bookkeeping. It wasn't until I
got to managerial accounting as a junior and auditing as a
senior that I got to the intellectually interesting part of
accounting, how one models an organization in terms of its
financial system in order to understand how to make it
stronger. Before that came two years of what was, to me,
rather dull bookkeeping -- learning the "basics" so that we
could get to the professional activities. I often tell
students today that accounting is more interesting than it
probably seems for the first one, two, or three years.
Computer science may not have moved much faster back then.
I took a one-quarter CS 1 to learn how to program (in Fortran),
a one-quarter data structures course, and a couple of courses
in assembly language, job control language, and systems
programming, but within three or four quarters I was taking
courses in upper-division content such as databases, operating
systems, and programming languages -- all of which seemed like
the Real Thing.
One final note. I actually read the articles mentioned at the
beginning of this essay after following a link from another piece
by Chad, called
Science Is Not a Path to Riches.
In it, Chad says:
A career in research science is not a path to riches, or even
stable employment. Anyone who thinks so is sadly deluded, and
if sure promotion and a fat paycheck are your primary goal (and
you're good at math), you should become an actuary or an accountant
or something in that vein. A career in research science can be
very rewarding, but the rewards are not necessarily financial
(though I hasten to add, I'm not making a bad living, either).
This is one place where we differ from physicists and chemists.
By and large, CS graduates do get good jobs. Even in times of
economic downturn, most of our grads do pretty well finding and
keeping jobs that pay above average for where they live. Our
department is willing to
advertise this
when we can. We don't want interested kids to turn away because
they think they can't get a job, because all the good jobs are
going to India.
Even still, I am reluctant to over-emphasize the prospect of
financial reward. For one thing, as the mutual fund companies all
have to tell us, "past performance is no guarantee of future results".
But more importantly, intrinsic interest matters a lot, too, perhaps
more so than extrinsic financial reward, when it comes to finding a
major and career path that works. I'd also like to attract kids
because CS is
fun, exciting, and worth doing.
That's where the real problem of 'verticality' comes in. We don't
want kids who might be interested to turn away because the discipline
looks like a boring grind.
I hope to learn more about this systemic problem from the empirical
data presented in Talking About Leaving, and use that to
figure out how we can do better.
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