There's a very revealing comment on the Educational Conscription blog:
Having been the admissions tutor for my university department for many years, I can assure you that is not the case. In my subject (Computer Science) we were quite clear that a lower UCAS point score including useful subjects, like Matehmatics would get you a place, whereas a higher UCSAS score including useless subjects like "Information Technology" would not.Information Technology is, in principle, closely related to Computer Science. In practice, it isn't. It is a dumbed-down easy option that has little value.
Are schoolchildren made aware of this when they have to choose their subjects?
3 comments:
Here, it depends on which department offers the degree, but yes, many IT degrees are bogus.
Computer Science departments are plagued by applicants who claim to be interested in the subject; inquiry reveals that usually they mean that they like computer games.
There's nothing particularly new about this. I graduated in Computational Science in 1987 and I remember when we first arrived that our lecturers said that they preferred us not to have done any computing at A-Level because it would just waste time eliminating bad habits and misconceptions.
CS is still a very immature field, pure CS is probably closest to being a branch of Applied Mathematics. I think that everybody should be aware of Dijkstra's famous quote "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes".
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