Comment by asimeqi

7 days ago

15 years after MIT made the same switch from Scheme to Python. Since CS at MIT seems to be fine, so will CS at NEU.

7 comments

asimeqi

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fn-mote  7 days ago

"Everything will be OK" - people will succeed in any system. Nobody will ever compare the outputs of the two systems, so nobody will ever know.

Let me instead suggest that one question we should ask is: What kind of students will be successful in the new system? What kinds of students will not?

One interesting thing aspect of the former curriculum is that (IMO) it provides an entry for students who are not entering with a lot of pre-existing knowledge. One of the criticisms of "old school" computer science teaching is that it privileges students who already have exposure to the material... The former curriculum is not the only way to level the playing field, but it certainly does provide a more level playing field for students who might not even be sure about the major.

I will stop with the suggestion that (IMO) pre-existing experience is definitely not the best indicator of future developer quality, so I value a curriculum that does not select for this.

(Caveats: never saw the new curriculum, it could be just fine, there are lots of other ways to accomplish this goal, but still... I am concerned.)

  • dehrmann  6 days ago

    I don't know how much I buy the "leveling the playing field" argument. In my computer architecture class, we learned Sparc assembly. Very few people had encountered much assembly, and definitely not Sparc. At first, it was level, but people with more programming experience quickly adapted since it wasn't actually that different.

synchronousq  6 days ago

I believe this is a fundamental misjudgement of the CS curriculums at MIT and NEU and, apologies for being blunt, probably the worst take on this thread.

The student populations at MIT and NEU, particularly in CS, are fundamentally different. The majority of undergraduates at CS MIT participate in academic research while the vast majority of CS undergraduates at NEU do not (do not let NEU's exceptionally high computer science research output [1] confuse you - the undergraduate and graduate schools are very separate). MIT educates significantly less students than NEU. MIT's algorithms class (6.046) is significantly more rigorous than NEU's equivalent (CS3000) - just compare the publicly available curriculum and problem sets [2,3]. In general, MIT's CS curriculum caters towards the third of the student body that go on to do PhDs, while NEU's CS curriculum caters towards the vast majority of students that beeline towards industry [4,5]. The institutional goals and educational values between MIT and NEU could not be more different. I know all of this to be true because I've spent a significant amount of time at both institutions.

I don't know if NEU will butcher its CS curriculum. I hope not. I guess we'll just have to see.

P.S. it's worth checking out Pyret [4], essentially a functional teaching programming language. The language is mostly written by NEU staff, so I wager NEU's future CS curriculum plans to phase out Racket in favor of Pyret.

[1] https://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2014/toyear/2024/index?all... [2] https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.046/ [3] https://tlarock.github.io/teaching/cs3000/syllabus.html [4] https://facts.mit.edu/alumni/ [5] https://www.northeastern.edu/experiential-learning/co-op/ [6] https://pyret.org

bmitc  6 days ago

MIT, despite it thinking otherwise, is a slave to industry, funding, and trends.

lo_zamoyski  6 days ago

History says otherwise.

Before the current curriculum was implemented, a good portion of students were having difficulty finding jobs and co-ops. After the switch, employers were very eager to hire these students.

The change is not a mere "switch to Python" (which itself is not nothing). It is the replacement of a good curriculum with something mediocre.

Also, I don't know how MIT is doing after the switch.