6
Dec
Christmas, What’s That? All I Know Is, the Semester’s Almost Over
Topic: Family and Friends
Eidan’s arrival took the frequency of my blogging down a notch, and this last month of the semester has taken it down another notch. The midterm for my Java class was right before Thanksgiving, and the final exam is on the 20th. The work has gotten harder as the semester’s progressed, so it’s been taking up every last iota of my free time (and then some).
I had high hopes for the class, as it’s taught by the head of Penn’s MCIT program. Now that it’s almost over, I have to say I’m very disappointed with it. My perspective on it is probably unusual, in that I’ve taught a semester-long programming course, but never taken one until now. It was an “introduction to programming” class (I would have been able to skip it if I already knew Java, but I didn’t), so a good number of the students had no programming experience. The most significant shortcoming is that he did not spend any time at all teaching us how to program. The lectures - delivered in an unwavering, soft-spoken monotone - were all about the rules and features of Java. That’s not enough. An analogy would be a baseball coach trying to teach his team how to play solely by lecturing about the rules of baseball. Teaching the rules is important, but it’s also essential to get into techniques and strategy, and he provided almost none of that. Successful programming is maybe 30% or 40% knowing the rules and capabilities of the language your using, and the rest is creative problem solving. The assignments were very challenging, and it was frustrating to watch my fellow students stumble blindly through them, as they just weren’t equipped to do them (he grades on a curve to compensate).
When I taught my Perl class I spent half my time lecturing about Perl, and the other half presenting common programming challenges and explaining different ways to approach them. I’m hoping that there are other teachers in the MCIT program who also take this approach, as the classes I’ll be taking in the future will get into areas of programming I’m not familiar with, so I won’t be able to fall back on my experience to get me through them. Unfortunately, the first 3 courses I have to take are all taught by the same professor I have now, so I’m stuck with him for two more semesters :-(.
If I could be in any program I wanted, I’d go down the street to Drexel University’s MSIS program. It’s been ranked #1 by US News & World Report. But one of my employee benefits at Penn is that I can take classes here for free (well, almost free - the cost of the tuition is treated as if it were part of my salary, so I pay some extra tax), and it’s hard to compete with free.
September 10th, 2007 at 3:12 pm
Hey dude,
i got admission in MCIT in upenn,i am bit dissappointed after reading your blog,is the course really that bad?,i’ve got almost 3yrs programming experience and would be paying close to $50,000 as tuition fee so i really need to know if MCIT is worth,
i havent read a single good thing about upenn till date,i am really getting scared,is there anything good about the university and the MCIT program?
September 12th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
Hi Abdul,
Overall UPenn is a great university, but IMHO the MCIT program is weak. I dropped out of it after two classes. My grades were fine, I just didn’t feel the benefit I was getting was equal to the effort I was putting in. The workload was very heavy, and the relatively poor quality of the instruction made it difficult to get through. Often our assignments would rely on code libraries written by the prof, and half the time his code would be buggy, and the students would have to spend time in class convincing him of it.
I had the same teacher for both classes, which means it’s quite possible the other profs are better.