I got thinking about this after reading an entry on The Daily WTF which described a meeting in which a cocky young graduate was giving a solid old programmer the blame for something that was not his fault. The old programmer printed the raw data his code was receiving to show that the problem was "upstream" of him (with the young graduate's stuff). When the young graduate saw the data he insisted he knew what the problem was, letters were getting mixed in with the numbers by the old programmer. The old hand pointed out that this was called HEX and was a way of presenting binary data. The young graduate refused to believe that and insisted that was rubbish! The fact that someone could graduate from a CS degree without having heard about HEX is bad but what really got me thinking was a reply by a reader who insisted this post was a hoax because it was just not possible to graduate from any CS course anywhere without knowing about HEX. I thought about that for a second and came to the conclusion that I would have no problem believing that there are graduates from my college (NUI Maynooth) out there now who have no idea what HEX is!

Basically I have come to the conclusion that a CS degree is not really worth the paper it's written on when you are interested in hiring computer programmers or system administrators. People get through degrees without being tested on their understanding of the fundamentals. You can pass each year and still know nothing important and nothing useful.

From what I have seen over the last eight years I believe a lot of blame lies with way Universities are being administered and the environment that the university administrators are being forced to work in. The most important things seem to be student numbers and pass rates rather than the maintenance of academic standards. As a result standards are slipping. I had to learn an awful lot more to pass first year eight years ago than the first years this year have to know but they will be awarded the same degree as me despite having studied and been examined on significantly less material. The constant pressure being applied on departments to pass students is resulting in an alarming decline in the standards needed to pass.

Pass rates must be kept high regardless of the realities of the situation. I have seen this in NUI Maynooth where the points being achieved by students entering the CS courses in their Leaving Cert exams are getting lower and lower each year, hence the academic ability of the students is dropping but the department is still expected to pass people at the same rate. In these situations something has to give and based on my experiences I think it is the standards that are being destroyed. IMO they are in free-fall. I am horrified when I compare the content of first year computer science at NUI Maynooth now to what I had to do in my first year back in 1997. We had to learn at least 25% more to pass than the current batch yet their degrees will be the same as mine. Mind you this is not just a CS issue, I see the same story in each of the subjects I studied for my degree (Maths, Mathematical Physics & Experimental Physics). In fact it is even worse than that, from some basic research on the web and reading other people's blogs this problem appears to be rampant not just in NUI Maynooth, no even just in Irish Universities but around the world.

This decline in standards is happening because the sections that students find hard are getting the chop or being made optional or less important in exams REGARDLESS OF HOW IMPORTANT THEY ARE. programming is being decimated, data structures is being gutted, advanced topics like numerical computation stripped out completely and so on. The current students are not getting the education they deserve because as soon as something is seen as being hard it is taken off the course for the next year in a desperate attempt to keep pass rates up. Of course stripping down the first year course has knock on effects as does stripping down the content of subsequent years so that in the end we have almost a positive feed back situation where the total deficit in learning becomes massive by the time the students graduate. CS graduates can now graduate without having an understanding of the core principles of computer science so it is not surprising that there are graduates who don't know what HEX is!

What does this all mean? Well IMO it means that having a CS degree tells IT employers nothing concrete about employment candidates, it does not give them any guarantees of basic understanding or that the candidates will have any elementary IT skills.

I run a small IT company and I would not hire a programmer based on the fact that they graduated with a degree, I have seen first hand just how little that means. When it comes to hiring system administrators the situation is even worse, none of the skills needed by system administrators are actually thought or examined in the degrees in NUI Maynooth, or as fas as I know, any other Irish Universities. A graduate with a first class honors degree who knows everything (s)he was thought but no more would be totally useless to me, and most other IT employers. I would not be able to employ that person as a programmer or as a system administrator.

The people I would be looking for, and most other IT employers, would be people who thought themselves the important stuff in their own time by joining student IT societies or just by messing around on their own.

I honestly belive that our degrees are getting so erorded that they are no longer actually worth anything and that anyone doing a CS degree needs to learn the important stuff in their own time. If you are in NUI Maynooth I would strongly urge you to join MiNDS> so as to give yourself some chance of being employable after your 4 years here!

Addendum (added same day at 21:30)

Just to illustrate how bad the slippage of standards has gotten, programming has been completely removed from the first year of the Computer Science course for the omnibus Science degree in NUI Maynooth (the degree I graduated with in 2001). CS100 "Principles of Computer Programming" has been replaced with "Computer Science past present and future", "What is Computation?" and "Introduction to Databases". Since the second, third and fourth year courses that students have been taking up to now assumed an ability to program this decision to gut first year will have a huge knock on effect on the content of the courses these students will get in the remainder of their degree and result in another massive wave of erosion of standards in my alma mater.

[tags]Education, Computer Science[/tags] 

Note

This post was initially posted to my old blog here . Comments may no longer be posted there and should be posted here but there are still old comments there that people may be interested in.