Why is being technically competent shunned at uog?

Whoa.

Lately in the CIS program, technical expertise seems to be shunned, nefarious terms such as "well rounded" and "critical thinking" are tossed around instead. Courses are becoming less about computer science, and more about art (regular journals, talking about various experiences, are increasingly becoming the norm). Assignments are being made easier and easier, for reasons that I can only guess at. The software engineering course about year ago had a final group assignment that my software engineering course had for a 5% individual project. This is a problem because an assignment that simple can be completed entirely WITHOUT ANY KNOWLEDGE OF OR COMPETENCE IN SOFTWARE ENGINEERING PRACTICES. It used to be that the final group project would be large enough that if you didn't do a good design, if you didn't test properly, at the end you wouldn't have anything that would resemble a complete, working project.

I think I was in that class with you Josh, and if I recall, didn't some groups jump immediately to implementation while others followed a more traditional quasi-waterfall approach? My point mainly being that (if memory serves) the term project may not have been as difficult as we all like to remember. Of course I can't substantiate this claim with any evidence, nor do I know of any objective way to do so, but I think it is just as likely that the perceived difficulty of the present term project(s) appear just as 'inadequate' as the very same term projects completed in previous years did to senior students at that time.

[Be prepared: I am going to play the 'grizzled' industry-experience card]
Along those lines, in terms of teaching 'good' software engineering and system analysis concepts, I can say that in 2.5 years working as a software developer in the telecommunications industry, seldom do any of the concepts introduced in those courses come into play. Perhaps the telecom sector is an exception, but I fear it is more representative than anyone cares to admit. That being said, I have seen instances where these concepts are employed, but usually it is in some half-hearted or otherwise misguided manor. That is not to say that said concepts are not important (personally I believe they are), but I have been convinced by my industrial experience that those wishing to graduate from university and enter a world of requirements documents, design specifications and sane work flows are simply setting themselves up for a huge dissapointment.

This isn't limited to one course either: The entry level courses have been severely dumbed down, to the point where I believe the failure rate for 2750 (one of the last courses to remain anywhere near challenging) had a drop rate of > 2/3, and the drop date was extended past the official date to try and keep students in the course.

Again, it is difficult to objective measure / quantify this perceived 'easyness', even if it legitimately exists. Your anecdote regarding the drop date is certainly alarming, but I wonder how that particular year compares to previous years? Sure it might be a noticeable departure from the norm; but that is not the same as a definitive indication that the CIS program has gone 'soft', or that this years particular course offering was overly difficult, or even that the present crop of students are underachieving. As far as I can tell, all we have to go on is anecdotal evidence. I for one am hesitant to make any claims until more objective data has been presented.

Add to this, http://socis.ca/node/994 . About a year ago, I remember hearing about how the old system of submitting via command line was "too challenging" for some students (and that system had worked for about 10 years I believe. It wasn't new when I started here in 2001). Instead, we now need fancy unreliable web frontends that add unnecessary complexity, when a simple and robust command line is all that is needed.

Way-down, deep inside, I agree with you 100%. However, perhaps there were issues regarding the command line interface that we do not know about? Perhaps Moodle solves some of these problems, as well as others we (as undergraduate students and UTAs) wouldn't normally see. On the otherside, it may just be a useless pile of "web goop". My point here is that we suspect or 'heard' the reason for changing was due to a perceived difficulty, but do we actually know for certain? I find it hard to believe that the sole reason the switch was made was because the command line tool(s) were too hard to use.

Then there have been some sessional profs, who were teaching courses that they obviously knew nothing about, and who could barely speak english (and I mean really bad english, to the point where one could not even make a good guess at what written material meant. We have a significant number of asian professors here whose english is obviously their second language, and I can understand every single one of them quite well. This isn't just a racist rant). When faced with something like this, if you actually want to learn something, all you can do is drop. And you can't even rate the professor, because you didn't stay in the course! (even though you've already paid for the course, since by the 40th class day you get nothing back). I'd also like to note that there have been some very very good sessionals too... but there needs to be some better screening.

I wonder if it is a matter of 'better screening' or a lack of qualified applicants? Those issues aside, communicating with people through thick-ascents is a fact of life. From an industry perspective, I can recall a number of times where I could not understand a single spoken word uttered by a particular individual, but was forced to colloborate with them anyway. It was tremendously difficult and irritating - but it was feasible. In this context, 'dropping' was not an option. Granted, I wasn't paying to participate in the activity (quite the opposite), but the level of stress generated by the communication barrier was probably comparable.

And lets get onto the Area of application: Many universities (such as waterloo) let you take a compsci degree and then specialize into software engineering or something like that. Instead, at guelph there is first an area of application, and THEN on top of that there is a MAXIMUM number of CIS credits that they will let you take! It's like, we don't want you to know anything more about compsci, go away. I have heard the argument that in CIS you will work with other fields, so it's good to know other things. But, you can't possibly cram knowledge of every single field down our throats in 4 years on top of learning Compsci, so isn't it better to let us get really good at compsci, and then learn other fields when we need them? Or work with other people who are specialists in their respective fields? (From my understanding of history and economics, specialization as opposed to self-sufficiency is what led to the productive economies we have today). And while many people won't agree with me, isn't at least allowing us the CHOICE to learn more about compsci during our undergraduate degree reasonable, instead of the measures in place which seem to actively discourage us from doing so? Which leads me to my next topic...

Uh oh. I didn't really consider this. I'm presently eyeing up pattern recognition/compilers for next semester, I sincerely hope this doesn't get derailed since I already have completed my compulsory complement of CIS courses (and then some).

My personal feeling is that Guelph is trying to target a niche market in allowing (read: forcing) students to broaden their horizons just a bit. Perhaps this a fad, spurred on by employer feedback, or maybe it is an attempt to keep the 'university experience' distinct from that of traditional college programs with little to any exposure to interdisciplinary contexts. I agree that students should have the option to emerse themselves in CIS if they satisfy the other requirements of the degree, especially if they are interested in pursuing research careers.

And while I'm on the topic of "we're well rounding you to appeal to the real world (employers)", ignoring that I'm not allowed to make my own assessment of what is valuable in the workplace, there is one huge gap in our education: SQL. Arguably, pretty much every industry job that you take will have some application somewhere backing onto a SQL database to manage it's data. And we do practically NO SQL in 3530. The next database course also does not do any SQL. (Not that it should, it was a very good course, but I'm pointing out the lack of real SQL in the program). The only SQL done in the 3530 course involved making FOR LOOPS IN PROCEDURAL FUNCTIONS on oracle. Instead of trying to make an efficient normalized schema with proper indexes and querying, we were encouraged to make for loops!!! Many people implemented their entire assignments with 3-4 nested for loops, and that was considered the correct way to do things!

I would agree with this, but given the departments mandate, a course with more SQL may dip too far into the "applied" domain for their liking. Granted, using SQL as a vehicle for the expression of theoretical concepts (much like our code submissions do) does seem feasible, but I don't readily know how this could be incorporated into 353 without cutting out some of the crusty theoretically stuff we all came here to learn ;)

Now, onto why this is happenning... My best guess is because enrollment is down. I can understand that the department is probably trying to keep revenues up, but it seems to be at the expense of the degrees of the people who had previously gone through the program. I'm not the only CIS student who feels this way, and I echo the comments of another student who once said at one of our town hall meetings that I would discourage any potential employers from hiring the current crop of students coming through the program. Although I would tone down that, and instead suggest that they more carefully evaluate those students skills.

Completely agree - any company (or person) who wires solely based on reputation deserves what they get. I've interviewed 20-30 people for positions in software development from various programs and I have yet to find a school/program that distinguished itself from the rest.

I admit that this has turned into a large rant about CIS at guelph. To be fair, I think that guelph's CIS program also has a lot of good going for it too, which is why I have signed up for graduate work here (largely because I will be allowed to *just* focus on computer science finally).

Not all of these developments are new at guelph, as guelph has had an area of app for as long as I can remember. But it seems that lately, the pendulum is swinging even further away from it's focus on computer science, and more towards being "well rounded". Whatever that means.

From a personal perspective, I'm finding that pendulum to be tremendously liberating. Combining CIS/Math/Stat and Psychology in the manner I have would simply not be possible at other schools. However, I understand your concern and also wonder how it will all play out.

Grant

Refer to page 6 figure 1.1 in the textbook, User-Centered Website Developement.

Fact: Computer Science is becoming HIGHLY interdisciplinary.
Fact: Not EVERYONE that exits this program is taking a job as a Software Developer.
Fact: You CAN cram knowledge from every field in 4 years, you just need to sign up for the courses.

I read this rant with some interest. As usual it is only by accident that
a faculty member reads these forums. Firstly, I'm not going to comment on everything said... everyone is entitled to their comments.

Firstly, the curriculum has changed over the past years... there is no doubt about that. The first change made a few years ago was to blend
students from 1650 into 1500. This change was made because the curriculum of teaching Java and OO in first year does not work effectively. Many students leaving this course had a lack of knowledge of the basics of
programming, and by programming I do not mean coding. I was also the fact that bouncing from java to C to java served no real purpose. The way the curriculum works now, of 2 semesters of C, followed by OO works. Part of the change of curriculum was to streamline the offerings throughout the program.

Yes, the curriculum does have a warm and fuzzy feeling... more writing, communications, and the like. It's kind of what the more competent companies are looking for... more well rounded individuals. The university environment does not always reflect 100% of what the market wants. If it did, maybe we would be teaching .NET or C# ?

Maybe we should have a discussion session to talk about these issues.

BTW, there is talk of creating streams, such as a software stream, to
incorporate more CS courses... maybe even as an area of application.

Michael

Josh, you've commented on 'moodle being down' in a couple of forums and I feel the need to add some facts.

Moodle wasn't down. The server (ie apache) was being attacked by a denial of service attack. Moodle is just a bunch of scripts running under the web server- same as any other web-based content management system.

In fact, the CIS web server was "down" at the same time- since the same physical machine hosts both applications at the moment and one DOS attack took them both out.

I completely agree that the 'perception' was that moodle was down- and that perceptions count. However, in this particular instance it wouldn't have mattered what submission system was used... if it were web based, it would have been down.

Last bit of fact. I am not the system admin for moodle. It is managed, along with all the other systems, by the capable folks behind the pcrepair email address. When I got your complaint, I simply forwarded it to pcrepair. I do content management, not system management.