Posted on 01/13/2020 4:48:07 PM PST by karpov
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In response to my Quillette article, a group of graduate students in the Allen School filed a grievance against me with their union. The university agreed to several of their demands, including that, “A group of (mostly senior) faculty will review the introductory programming courses to ensure that they are inclusive of students from all backgrounds.” A working group was formed and it produced a set of recommendations. These included:
A relaxation of grading on coding style.
Allowing students to work together in a group for part of their grade instead of requiring them to complete all graded work individually.
Training for TAs in inclusion and implicit bias.
Review of all course materials for inclusiveness. For instance, of a lecture that involves calculating body mass index (BMI) using guidelines from the National Institutes of Health, the report noted that it “seems insensitive to present students with a program that would print out that some of them are ‘obese’ while others are ‘normal.’”
A reduction in the amount of effort expended pursuing cheating cases by 50 percent even though there has been no reduction in cheating cases.
The report also recommends that courses incorporate inclusiveness best practices as outlined in an Allen School document. These include:
The addition of an indigenous land acknowledgement to the syllabus.
The use of gender-neutral names like Alex and Jun instead of Alice and Bob.
The use of names that reflect a variety of cultural backgrounds: Xin, Sergey, Naveena, Tuan, Esteban, Sasha. An avoidance of references that depend on cultural knowledge of sports, pop culture, theater, literature, or games.
The replacement of phrases like “you guys” with “folks” or “y’all.”
A declaration of instructors’ pronouns and a request for students’ pronoun preferences.
(Excerpt) Read more at quillette.com ...
Yep. The school that caves to this requirement is making their students unemployable. If they manage to land a job, they won’t keep it for very long. They’ll drive their co-workers nuts and the lead engineer will be telling the chief engineer, “We gotta get this clown outta here.” When they’re in their probationary period, how hard do you think that will be? Buh bye, PC loser!
We stopped recruiting here a long time ago.
Mark Steyn recently spoke about Cultural Confidence.
The confidence of having the Others fit into your culture, and asserting that your culture is good.
I still have many fond debugging memories.
Exactly.
Slacking [which today's yutes learn in SPADES] also leads to poor documentation. Teaching discipline in your coding corrects some of that.
Nah, it was C++ on a Unix box.
Alice, Bob and Eve (along with a cast of others) are standard names in cryptographic problems. Maybe we can change Eve the eavesdropper to James Comey.
The use of names that reflect a variety of cultural backgrounds: Xin, Sergey, Naveena, Tuan, Esteban, Sasha. An avoidance of references that depend on cultural knowledge of sports, pop culture, theater, literature, or games.
Take a minute, look it up on Wikipedia and figure it out. Usually the programming assignments I saw were well enough defined that you didn't need any external knowledge. For example, a bowling scoring assignment would explain how scoring is done so you didn't need to know about bowling to write the program.
Truer words were never spoken. It is just lovely to get an error message list ten times longer than your program.
I just hate to work on undocumented software. It is especially bad when the code is either too clever or just pedestrian.
“Coding style is very important. Code should be easy to follow and read. I speak from professional experience. NOT teaching the good coding style cheats the students.”
totally. aside from being correct and robust, style is everything, because great style is what allows others to understand and easily modify a code; great style also helps to prevent bugs and makes finding bugs easier.
style includes a large number of elements, including:
1. Extensive and USEFUL commenting
2. Indention and use of a large amount of space (as opposed to scrunching everything up)
3. Avoidance of multi-line statements
4. Avoiding use of complex, esoteric, and obtuse constructs, including avoiding uncommon language elements unless there’s a damn good reason.
5. And of course use of structured programming techniques, such as avoiding breaking out of complex, nested loop structures in a willy nilly fashion, etc.
Amen. I always say “I don’t care if your code works as long as I can read it we can fix it, if not, we toss it and start over”
“Amen. I always say “I don’t care if your code works as long as I can read it we can fix it, if not, we toss it and start over””
and i would imagine that finding programmers that can write readable code is WAY more difficult than finding programmers who write code that works ...
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