I saw an interesting post by Emma on students in programming who don't know programming. Furthermore, she talks about students who are computer science majors who lack any prerequisite knowledge. I don't want to sound elite or anything in saying this, but if you pick a major, you had better at least know something about your fucking field. I see this problem all the time, even at the tutoring center - it's somewhat depressing. You sit in a session for an hour, working with a design student that doesn't know how to resize their image to 72 DPI to put on the Internet. You sit for another 50 minutes with a student who thinks a web page should be done entirely in Macromedia Flash but couldn't tell you a damn thing about motion guides. You sit with a kid on the programming track, and he doesn't know how the return statement in c++ works for functions. I fucking kid you not. This is like being an English major and not knowing what MLA is or being a Math major and not knowing basic Algebra.
So how do these people keep getting passed in prerequisite classes? I don't know about other schools, but here at least, you only fail if you are genuinely trying to fail. Our school is soft and doesn't crack down on students, especially in our HCOM and CST departments. People are being passed out of English classes and are still writing a paper thesis that reads "I think that the author might have meant ________". Kids are taking advanced computing classes and they have a hard time saving their work to a Zip disk so they can take it with them. And yes, they keep getting passed higher up.
I sit here in capstone now, my senior year when I am supposed to be putting together the biggest, most comprehensive project that reflects my learning experience at CSUMB. They guy two rows in front of me is "redesigning a web site". And from what it looks like, it is going to get approved. Not a database driven site, not a multimedia portfolio, this person's final senior project is to create a first generation web page using Macromedia Dreamweaver. They also think this process will taken them ~300 hours to complete. I look from his proposal back to my own, and I feel almost sick. A part of me wants to do something so easy I could get away with it. But I know that's a bad idea, as I won't actually learn anything. As it stands, my project gets into web application development, and class structure and manipulation with PHP. It's databases, it is web languages, it is object oriented, and it is programming, pulling together most of what I have learned these 4 years. I guess I'm just sort of miffed at "acceptable" work. About as mystified as Emma is at advanced programmers who don't know their loops.
In response to "The Kids Know Nothing":