

A look at Stanford computer science: Challenges of a growing field - danso
http://www.stanforddaily.com/2015/04/16/a-look-at-stanford-computer-science-part-ii-challenges-of-a-growing-field/

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Tunecrew
More persons w/ only Masters but not PhDs should be used to teach the intro
classes.

Although I was in EE at Stanford, I took a bunch of CS classes, and hands down
Nick Parlante (an instructor, not a professor) was the best actual teacher
that I had. CS108 and CS193i

Plus it is possibly that these persons actually make better teachers as
opposed to quite a few professors, who are more preoccupied with research,
tenure, grad students, etc.

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mathattack
I hear you. There is a distinctly different skill set between "Pushing the
boundary of human knowledge" and "Teaching an intro class well." Universities
and tenure have historically been built on this being a high correlation.
Reality is that sometimes it happens, sometimes not. Universities need to
decouple the teaching from the research. Some of that is leveraging the best
pure teachers available.

At my grad school, the joke was that Nobels were more important for admissions
than academics.

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Animats
_“We’re all teaching three times as many students as we were six years ago,
and we don’t have any more of us and any more money.”_

That's pathetic. It's not like Stanford doesn't have the money.

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beisner
It's not really about the money, though. The number of qualified, published
academics in CS is just not high enough to meet new academic demands. I'm
currently a student at an Ivy League school with an extremely reputable CS
department, and we just hired 3 new professors who were considered big wins
for the department (we have also seen a quadrupling of CS majors in the last 4
years). The thing is, we sent out something like 12 offers. Schools across the
country are trying to scale their CS departments as elastically as they can
(Yale, for instance, just launched an initiative), but the number of qualified
professors is relatively inelastic. Of course, not all teaching jobs require a
PhD (intro classes and applications classes, for example), but there are so
many other more theoretical classes that do require an experienced professor.

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0xdeadbeefbabe
Seems like they should use some math teachers for set theory, turing machines,
and the chomsky hierarchy.

Also what's wrong with stats teachers teaching machine learning?

CS hasn't been an S for that long, so I think you can rely on these other
fields somewhat.

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ryanburk
agreed. it has been over 15 years since I graduated from a pretty good CS
program in an engineering school, and we definitely had math professors
teaching many core courses that were math focused (e.g.
[http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs2800/2015sp/](http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs2800/2015sp/)).
and professors from other engineering disciplines taught courses across (e.g.
OR/IE profs doing stats).

this might have been possible at my school and not possible elsewhere based on
how the different departments are focused / rewarded / isolated. more math
profs might have been interested in getting CS experience back then.

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mathattack
“We’re all teaching three times as many students as we were six years ago, and
we don’t have any more of us and any more money.”

This seems very strange. Are universities still so far in the dark ages of
management accounting that they don't give departments more money if they have
more students taking their classes? I understand it won't be purely
proportional (Philosophy departments may need to have small classes and
require subsidies) but if a department grows 3X, shouldn't the resources at
least grow somewhat? Say 2X or 2.5X? If not, it's a recipe for disaster.

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suyash
700 students in 1 class, now that is ridiculous.

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chambo622
I hear at Berkeley some of the intro classes can reach 1,200. More students
registered then there are seats. Students are forced to skip class and watch
recorded lectures online.

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QuercusMax
If you need one-on-one instruction in an intro to CS class, you may want to
consider a different major, or take a semester off and learn to code before
enrolling in a CS program.

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mathattack
Thanks for sharing!

Part 1 -> [http://www.stanforddaily.com/2015/04/15/a-look-at-
stanford-c...](http://www.stanforddaily.com/2015/04/15/a-look-at-stanford-
computer-science-part-i-past-and-present/)

