
One of the problems with CS education today - look_mom_its_me
I enrolled in a Coursera&#x27;s online CS degree program. I have am an EE interested in a CS degree in AI&#x2F;ML.<p>I have decades of software engineering under my belt and transferable academic credit (C programming, elementary to advanced). I have worked on embedded systems, FPGA&#x27;s, web and mobile software and hardware dev. I have developed software in assembley, C, Forth, Lisp, C++, JS, Python, Objective-C and more. Also HDL&#x27;s: Verilog and VHDL.<p>What&#x27;s the problem?<p>They requires all students to take the following courses:<p>Intro to Programming 1 and 2
How Computers Work
Web Development<p>This will consume somewhere between 1 and 1.5 years.<p>Yes, someone who knows little to nothing should take these modules.<p>What about someone who has years of experience and some relevant academic work?<p>These programs do not have a sensible assessment test one could take in order to demonstrate capability.<p>I think this is a serious problem.<p>At the very least this does not respect student&#x27;s time and prior accomplishments. Forcing someone to devote two semesters to &quot;Intro to Programming&quot; when they know the material inside-out is silly at best.<p>A further problem is that it seems none of the organizations have any interest in addressing this issue. Repeated pleads at the highest levels have resulted in nothing.<p>And so someone like me is facing the reality of having to spend a year+ &quot;learning&quot; how computers work, how to write a &quot;for&quot; loop and use arrays when hardware I designed that has flown in space and I have designed and programmed embedded computers from scratch --like 8080, 6502, MC86K, 8085, R65F11, C8051F100, PIC and other processors and published mobile apps.<p>This isn&#x27;t necessarily about money but that is likely a factor as well.<p>You ought to be able to prove what you know through a well designed test and enter these kinds of programs at the appropriate academic level.
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ginger4
That is so true. I study CS too. I'm a final year student and it's really hard
for me to cope with all these writing works and find time on exam preparation.
I guess i'll use a little help of PapersOwl essay writer service to save some
time. last time these guys helped me to get the highest score in the class.

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kazinator
My take on this is that with your background, you should be able to go
straight into a Master's degree CS program. Or at the very least, skip the
first two or three CS undergrad years entirely: take some fourth year stuff
only, maybe third.

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look_mom_its_me
I tried. It seems nobody is setup to consider the idea that one come come to
the table with deep and wide CS knowledge. The right approach would be one
where the person is evaluated through one or more tests and given the
opportunity to start the journey at the appropriate level.

I simply cannot understand the idea that someone at a university would think
it is fair to force someone to undergo over a year of what amounts to torture
before actually reaching courses where that person might start to learn.
Something is very seriously wrong with an educational system that is so
rigidly attached to a menu you must consume in a specified sequence without
regards for what the person might know before starting.

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mips_avatar
I think this is a part of the bigger problem, which is the lack of support for
continuing education. Our culture expects you to spend 20 years in daily
school and then just stop. How are you supposed to maintain relevant skills
for 40-50 years of work this way?

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look_mom_its_me
The worst part is that no credit is given for very reputable MOOC's at all. A
few years ago I took MIT's "Computational Thinking with Python" MOOC because I
got my high-school kid into it and wanted to go through it with him so I could
motivate and help him.

I even presented that certificate, and it was rejected: "We don't recognize
MOOC's". The irony is thick and wide.

And so, again, having, at the very least, done the MIT course they force you
to undergo the torture of "Fundamentals of Programming" 1 and 2 and the other
truly elementary beyond description stuff.

This is truly frustrating. And support is useless. They take five days to
answer any question and they must have so many students they have no time to
pay attention to anything. I have literally received answers having nothing to
do with my query.

Considering dropping out before it starts. The idea of spending a year and a
half "learning" about loops and arrays grinds my raw to the bone.

At a fundamental ethical level it is, in my opinion, wrong.

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mips_avatar
I saw a new udemy course that teaches c++. It would be pretty good for me
because a lot of related projects to mine are using multithreaded c++. And I
think this course would help me be a better teammate. But my company wouldn’t
pay for a udemy course. Not sure if that’s on my company or udemy though.

