Comment by 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.)
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.