Hmm... I know people with Bachelors in CS who couldn't do either of those successfully. They must have not gone to your school. It's different from school to school... a higher level of education means better teachers who are able to ask more of their students. MIT students are expected a lot, but of course their teachers can provide the knowledge to get their students on the right track.Originally Posted by DavidP
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>I know people with Bachelors in CS who couldn't do either of those successfully.
Well you do have to remember that they are a little bit scaled down. For example, on the Chess project there is no computer player. It was human vs. human. So no computer AI is needed.
So then what did you do, graphics?
Which comes down to keeping track of values at certain offsets in an array that represent the pieces and empty squares. That's simple.Well you do have to remember that they are a little bit scaled down. For example, on the Chess project there is no computer player. It was human vs. human. So no computer AI is needed.
Of course not.Also, the test is perhaps held 3 times a year.
The philosophy is that the only thing that matters is what you know, not when you aquired the knowledge. If companies want to know how ambitious you are, they look at the total time it took you to graduate.
Last edited by Sang-drax : Tomorrow at 02:21 AM. Reason: Time travelling
Universities don't need to emulate the harsh working environment... Their mission is to teach, not to make examples of those that didn't learn. In fact, the working environment is not so unforgiving as universities already are. A mistake in the job may or may not have repercussions. In fact, sometimes the error went unnoticed, other times, it was serious, and it was solved, and the boss simply told us to be more careful next time. With Universities, on the contrary, a bad day is all you need to have to repeat a term. Depending on the class you may have just wasted 3 or 6 months of your life (at least here in Portugal). And in the worst cases an whole year. With jobs... well, if things go wrong you don't need 6 months to look for another one.
A similar system to sweden also exists here in Portugal... and I think It's also the same in France, Spain and Germany at least. Of course, some courses don't have it, at least here. Medicine is one example where if you don't pay attention, you are basically flunked and the whole year(!) was lost.
Originally Posted by brewbuck:
Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.
I could imagine why.
And bubba makes it sound like "once failed, never learned" Some classes have only tests. My data structures class was poorly organized and the teacher was new and didn't have a set lesson plan. I had one project and a couple programming assignments, none of which were on data structures (aside from a simple stack-based assignment). I passed the class, but I feel that I didn't learn as much as I would have if I had taken another teacher who most people say is much better. So it's not always the case that failing and learning are 1:1.
This may be not a good advice, but some professors are that tough. If the majority of students fail the class, then it's the professor; otherwise, it's you.
Also, if you're not that smart, you might want to ask around your peers before taking someone's class.
Make use of the tutoring center if there is any.
source: compsci textbooks, cboard.cprogramming.com, world wide web, common sense
In the part of Sweden where I live you can't get any grade better than D if you were to fail and retake a test. You can however after completing a course read it again and raise your grades from there, but that will cost you unless you failed.
I'm tending more towards Bubba's point of view. It doesn't matter if you can code them. All that demonstrates is that your can follow instructions. And for that, a failiing grade cannot be changed to a passing one, because if it were, then how can you tell the difference between a failing student and a passing one ? The class isn't "Coding 101 : Learn to read an internet tutorial/Go on CBoard and implement a linked list", it's Data Structures, and you I think the passing criterion is quite clear in the name.
I know, this is a somewhat elitist point of view, but comp sci's never supposed to have been easy. People work hard to understand it. The coding has always been secondary. Few people seem to understand that in university computer science...
Teacher: "You connect with Internet Explorer, but what is your browser? You know, Yahoo, Webcrawler...?" It's great to see the educational system moving in the right direction
Well, a "failing person" does not have to be person who always fail. He or she might just not have been matured by the time or just didn't get into the programmer way of thinking. For this you shouldn't be penalized for the rest of the life just because you were slow at the start, especially when you can't choose when you want to take a class (i.e. compulsory eduction).
I think the basic mistake the OP made was to think that if he could code it he would pass the tests as well.
When you code you can debug just like the OP stated. When you take en exam or any written test there's no way you can debug that.
You take the exam, of course you can double check everything but in the end the grade is based on the errors and warnings that your compiler ( read: teacher or whoever that corrects the test ) finds.
I've had exams of a programming course that I found harder then the end project that we had to do for this course.
Reason: intellisense , compiler warnings, searching the internet and the ability to debug code makes programming look like an "easy" thing.
While in reality when one has to write code on a piece of paper and make sure that there is no mistake in it whatsoever, programming becomes more difficult.
Anyhow, since im not an evil person, I wish the OP goodluck in completing this course successfully.
There are universities, of course, that demand only the best from their students. Tolerance for failure is minimal, and self-sacrifice is almost imposed. However, these are the best. They expect to graduate only the elite. We know these universities.
However, when being asked only the best, we have the right to demand only the best teachers and universities. And not, as we see in these forums on a weekly basis, teachers that don't even care to update themselves with the latest standards, or universities that insist on using stone age software.
The teaching style and the demands universities make on their students are also largely based on how good/established/recognized that university is. Many great students graduate, of course, from small unknown universities. And they still have to prove themselves when faced against an MIT or Harvard student. Sometimes (perhaps all too many times), they did prove themselves... and still fail to get the job.
A student can expect demands of quality from their university. I'm not defending otherwise. But an healthy tyrannical approach to teaching has to be meet with great teachers, and established, recognized universities. To not accept failure from a student, when the teacher sucks and the university is only good for behind the counter jobs, is not right.
Originally Posted by brewbuck:
Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.
So they basically treat you like they're paying you for an education?
I'm not following you...
Originally Posted by brewbuck:
Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.
