From: kludge@panix.com   
      
   D   wrote:   
   >   
   >This was a painful read. =( I thought I saw this due to the fact that I   
   >teach at the vocational school level and not university level. Are yo   
   >useriously telling me that this b.s. goes one (and comes out of) the   
   >university level?   
      
   In the US there is not so much of a clear distinction between college,   
   university, and trade school.  We have for-profit trade schools that   
   now call themselves universities, and colleges with full university   
   programs.   
      
   I can think of a number of places that call themselves universities that   
   have CS programs that are basically programming programs... they exist   
   to teach kids to write code so they can get a job and only teach the   
   currently popular buzzwords and have no actual CS anywhere.   
      
   I can think of one place that calls itself a college which has a CS   
   program that is almost entirely theoretical... lots of proofs and lots   
   of algorithm analysis.  Enough programming to be useful but it's expected   
   students will learn that on their own.  A full year of graph theory, two   
   years of continuous mathematics.   
      
   And there is a standard ACM curriculum and there are places that follow it,   
   but there are a whole lot of places that don't.  I think the ACM curriculum   
   is very balanced between theory and practice and includes things like an   
   assembler class and a digital logic class which are not themselves useful   
   but which need to be taught in order to explain just what a computer actually   
   is.   
      
   But all of these places call themselves CS programs even though they have   
   a huge diversity in what they actually teach.   
      
   We also have a bunch of IT programs which are really business school programs   
   with some computing added.  I think those are pretty much worthless, but they   
   get a lot of students.   
   --scott   
   --   
   "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."   
      
   --- SoupGate-DOS v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)