fester@math.berkeley.edu (07/08/88)
Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario (not to be confused with all the other Queen's Universities - this one actually has a good reputation) offers a Conversion program in Computer Science. Like the one at Berkeley, it is a program for people who did their undergraduate work in another field, unlike the one at Berkeley, it is not targeted at minority groups, or at women. The aim of the program is to take people who want to apply computers to their chosen field and teach them how to work well with computers. It is supposed to address the problem that computer scientists can't talk to (biologists, psychologists, ...) and vica versa. In my year, there were 2 women, out of 14 students. We both graduated. One of us hates programming and has gone into marketing for a large computer firm, the other is a programmer and is applying her skills(?) to applied statistics. In the next year, the class was half women, one dropped out, and the rest did extremely well. After that, I graduated and lost touch with the program. Whether or not the program was a success depends on how you define success. The aim of the program was to educate people who would stay in their original field, and in this respect it was a failure, since most of us ended up in computing. However, the program did bring in a number of very bright and creative people who would otherwise never have been able to do graduate work in computing, and in that respect I think it has had a positive effect on the state of computing as a whole. I fully support the aims of the program. I have seen too many programmers who can't understand the problem they are being asked to program, and I have talked to too many people who don't understand what information a programmer needs in order to get the job done. I think it is very important to have people who are properly trained in both computing and in the field to which it will be applied. Well, that's the conversion part of the story - I think its a great idea. Now, as to taking people who are otherwise not qualified for a program and letting them in because they are in a minority group, that is another story. My experience has been that Lea Fester is correct: people are admitted to a program without the proper background, and then left to founder. Certainly the sole drop-out from the Conversion program was not adequately prepared, and she was in the program for the wrong reason. She had a PhD in Philosophy and was in the program "because this is my only chance to get a job". We did try to help her, but there was no organized tutorial or formal way of dealing with the problem. On the other hand, this particular program was not meant to educate people who had been "discriminated against", so it should not be expected to supply such help. At one point in my checkered past I taught in a federal goverment upgrading program whose explicit aim was to train women to take non-traditional jobs such as welders, machinists, etc. Virtually every one of them dropped out of the program when they had trouble with drafting, which involves Math. I stress that they did not have trouble with the welding, or the machining, in fact the teachers of those courses felt that on average the women were better than the men in the classes. They did not have trouble hoisting heavy engines in the small engines class. What they did have trouble with is Math, and there were no extra courses or special courses designed to address this problem. I found it very depressing to watch women who had built their own houses, rebuilt their own car engines, or whatever, drop out of the program due to a poor background in math. (P.S. The men in the course tended to have problems with the English courses, which the women found easy.) It is certainly very difficult to teach someone mathematical skills in a crash course at a late date. I don't mean that one has to be a genius in calculus or linear algebra to be a computer scientist (that's another argument altogether). What I mean is that it is hard to teach logic, how to approach a problem, how to break a problem down into smaller parts, to someone who has not assimilated these skills over the course of many years. Addressing the immediate problem means, as Lea says, means offering supplementary help (and also means that the minority groups/females have to make use of the help!). Addressing the long term problem means changing the entire way we "educate" people, which is another problem altogether, as well. Ruth Croxford Dept of Statistics, University of Toronto