Computing the Future A Broader Agenda for Computer Science and Engineering (1992) / Chapter Skim
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4 EDUCATION IN CS&E
4 EDUCATION IN CS&E
Pages 116-138
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From page 116... ...
Individuals from the computer industry want employees who can apply the fundamentals of CS&E to the creation of marketable products. Thus the computer industry recruits heavily in the CS&E departments of major universities, is generally satisfied with graduates' 116
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From page 117... ...
For example, in many universities, CS&E attracts more than its share of the best students (as measured by SAT scores, GRE scores, and graduate fellowships awarded by the university) .2 Graduate education in CS&E, which is older and more established than undergraduate education in CS&E, is held in high regard by the universities and industrial research laboratories responsible for hiring many of CS&E's graduates.
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From page 118... ...
While introductory courses for most scientific and engineering disciplines exhibit a relatively high degree of uniformity in content and approach, university-level introductory courses in CS&E exhibit striking variation. Some emphasize newer concepts in functional programming, logic programming, or object-oriented programming.
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From page 119... ...
Aggravating problems of faculty currency is the relatively slow rate at which it is possible to change the content of undergraduate courses. While new ideas generated by research institutions may influence undergraduate education at those institutions within a year or two, those ideas may take much longer to propagate beyond local boundaries.4 Thus the problem of faculty currency in undergraduate education is more acute in CS&E than in older disciplines like mathematics or physics, which have had a sound and stable foundation for decades.
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From page 120... ...
. ~ Rigor and Clarity According to testimony received from industrial representatives by the committee, new hires in programming and software engineering seldom approach their tasks with sufficient rigor, whatever their baccalaureate degree.
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From page 121... ...
This last point is particularly important because requests for changes in specifications are made quite often during the design, development, and implementation processes. Rigor and clarity are also necessary during the implementation phases of software engineering, and their importance increases for larger and more complex projects.
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From page 122... ...
This is unfortunate, because continuous mathematics is essential in important subfields in CS&E such as performance analysis, computational geometry, numerical analysis, and robotics. Further, continuous mathematics is the language of many scientific and engineering fields, and an adequate understanding of continuous mathematics is needed to approach computing applications in such areas with confi dence.
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From page 123... ...
The venerable programming style characterized by the procedural approach of languages such as Fortran and Algol has since been joined by others: (1) logic programming and declarative pro
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From page 124... ...
Broadening in all these ways puts pressure on the undergraduate curriculum; there is simply no room for all the broadening as long as the rest of the curriculum stays the same. Part of the problem is that the curriculum does not build on itself enough; too many courses have few prerequisites and are devoted to studying artifacts rather than establishing foundations and teaching enduring principles.9 In particular, undergraduate CS&E curricula typically include a large number of "systems" courses- compilers, operating systems, database systems, data communication, graphics, and so on.
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From page 125... ...
Computer scientists and engineers, as the vanguard of this information agents have a responsibility to explain its implications to the general public.`' In addition, computing has become as important as mathematics to science and engineering. Specialists in other science and engineering fields are beginning to understand that CS&E is more than Fortran programming and to recognize that an unde~s-tanding of the computer scientist's or engineer's approach to algorithms and information may be useful in their own areas (see Boxes 4.2 and 4.3; comparable though not identical boxes could also be constructed for chemists, biologists, earth scientists, and others)
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From page 127... ...
For example, in the mid-1980s, at some institutions the average CS&E faculty member was teaching twice as many credit hours as his or her counterpart in engineering disciplines, and the ratio of degrees awarded per faculty member in CS&E is still more than twice that of all sci
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From page 129... ...
. ence and engineering disciplines taken together (see Figure 8.5 in Chapter 8~.~° The bulk of service offerings should stress the CS&E necessary for effective computing practice.
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The undergraduate curriculum should be a foundation for professional achievement. A master's-level program and continuing education programs could more closely approximate programs that do provide professional certification.
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From page 131... ...
A doctoral dissertation is intended to demonstrate a student's individual ability to conduct original research in the field's "core" areas. It tends to emphasize work on manageable problems that are self-contained, with clean formulations.
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From page 132... ...
Only through serious and concerted effort can such questions be answered, although the committee believes that the criterion that a piece of work exhibit demonstrable intellectual achievement should not be abandoned. In some universities, breadth outside CS&E is promoted by requiring for the Ph.D.
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From page 133... ...
can and should be encouraged to take industrial positions in which they invent never technology or facilitate technology transfer, working on intellectually challenging problems that are also directly relevant to our economic well-being; teaching positions at nonresearch institutions are another possibility. Bachelor's degree holders (even some of the best ones)
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From page 134... ...
It is also a large and difficult task, for the potential need and demand for continuing education in CS&E is enormous. An estimated 800,000 individuals were employed as computer specialists in 1991.~5 If the number of these individuals remained constant, and each individual required one semester-length course every five years and if 25 students constituted one course, there would be a demand for 3200 nonintroductory courses per semester.
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From page 135... ...
In 1985, an NRC panel on continuing education concluded that "continuing education of engineers is essential to increasing national productivity" and that "continuing education is an entity in itself and can no longer be viewed as an 'add-on' role of industry and academia." The increasing thrust into the information age makes it even more important that software engineers obtain continuing education in CS&E. PRECOLLEGE CS&E EDUCATION y Committee discussions of undergraduate CS&E education touched on the impact of the previous exposure of undergraduates to programming and computer science in high school.
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From page 136... ...
2. One illustration is that for the 1988-1989 academic year at Cornell University, the incoming graduate student in computer science on average outperformed the incom
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From page 137... ...
7. In the 1989-1990 academic year, Ph.D.-granting institutions in CS&E awarded 9037 undergraduate degrees (David Cries and Dorothy Marsh, "The 1989-1990 Taulbee Survey," Computing Research News, Volume 3(1)
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From page 138... ...
For example, despite anticipated future downsizing of its work force, IBM is reported to have a hiring need for Ph.D.s in computer science that is greater than the entire supply produced by American universities each year. See Peter H
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