I've heard this before, but the problem is that those items that are referred and somewhat spun in a positive light are cherry-picked. In particular, they don't talk about the "items" of how this all gets paid for (more taxes, more deficit, taken out of medicare, etc...) and the general downstream ramifications of the law. Sure, there is partisanship going on, but it's not what this study suggests.

...to be met, like being able to be completely interchangeable with other members on your team, and having prior art to reasonably predict every aspect of effort. If that's not the case (say, in an R&D project where certain people are specialists in certain areas), this method does more harm than good. My best suggestion for using which method is to let the nature of the project choose the method, rather than the other way around.

..several years ago, without the C++ experience. I was applying for a good 5+ months. I was fortunate to get hooked up with a research institute associated with the university for a year doing more grunt-workshy stuff while I finished up my dissertation. It gave me some experience in image processing, which IMO is one of the most in-demand fields to get into if you want to stick with industry research. That was that on top of the Ph.D that got me my current position.

...but it also puts more and more pressure on principal investigators to color their conclusions in the direction of whatever is currently trendy in the eyes of the grant reviewers in that field in order to get future grants. It's not good.

You can only sue for actual harm that was caused. This would imply they would have to convince a jury that people took that campaign seriously.

But the NSA would be free to mention that fact and thus explain away their denial. But, they didn't.

I wouldn't draw too much from anything fiscally-related that comes out of California.

And who's defining what a CS degree this way? My point is that if we re-define that to include more on-the-job elements, the overall value of the education will go up. Any time you have an organization (not just higher education) be the primary evaluator of itself, over time you will get policies and groupthink are more and more out of touch with reality.

I think there's an easy middle ground to shoot for here. And note that industry are the ones providing the jobs, not the school, so they should intrinsically be in the driver seat more than the school should.

I'll be the first to admit wish I would known more about what was going to be coming my way after graduation, but I don't think that should let them off the hook. I paid them to educate me so I could get a job. Suppose I go buy a car from car dealership, but they don't put any oil in the engine (after all, they are selling you a car, not oil). You would call the person naive about cars if they ignored the engine light and tried to drive it as is, but that fact doesn't change that the dealership is dropping the ball. And having them "suggest" that you take additional/supplemental courses to prepare you for the job market is just an admission that their curriculum is sub-par. This again comes down to expectations. They don't better prepare you for post-graduation in their curriculum because they don't have to, and thus it detracts from the very point of higher education existing in the first place. My prediction is that if/when someone is able to change this system so that schools held to a better standard of preparation, the overall higher education quality will suddenly much more valued in society, and that person will go down as the genius who revolutionized the outdated western higher educational system.

You miss my point - school could do a better job preparing you for work.

There's often times when I don't understand what I'm doing when I receive an assignment and I have to go teach myself something new to get it done.

At my job? No - I'm expected to learn whatever I need to get it right the first time. At school? I had several courses where the professor told us straight up front he/she thought tests were stupid and out of touch with the real world and told us the majority of our grade would be homeworks and projects. Have to say I think I learned the most out of those courses, and being expected to get it right on the homeworks was not a hard thing at all - it made you take it more seriously than just assuming you would just bump up your grade at the final.

Well I had both in-class ones and ones where you submitted electronically before class. It made sure the students read the material before class and the lecture (which focused on the tougher parts of the material) wasn't wasted on the easy stuff. Seemed to work pretty well from my standpoint.

Yes, and they can do a better job with teaching you about Y as well.

And this is precisely the problem. It should be, in part. And if the professors don't want/can't do it, then find better ones that will.

Well I got a degree in CS to get a job related to CS, period. I really didn't have any expectation as to what I was going to learn, precisely - I trusted the school that they knew what I needed to know. I found out after I got out of school that there were a lot of things related to the computer industry that they didn't even mention once, let alone teach about it. And there were other things that they mentioned but gave you the distinct impression that it wouldn't matter if they glossed over it and get on with "more interesting" topics. Well guess what - interview after interview I kept running into the basic qualification questions. An example is "have you programmed in C++ before?". Sad to say, but somehow in all my coursework (undergrad and grad school), no. Other imperative programming languages, yes, and mostly functional languages like Scheme that no one in industry uses. I knew lots other really cool, advanced CS stuff that their company could use, but unfortunately that's not a substitute for C++ experience (coursework would have been acceptable). Could have I taught myself? Of course, but at that point it's too late. I need to get a job, not learn more. I'm not even talking about "flavor of the month" technology stuff, I'm talking about basic industry knowledge that a) many companies wants b) doesn't change much or too fast. It's not beyond the school to include/emphasize it more, it's just that they don't want to, and they won't change because currently they aren't held accountable to the type of education they provide. Sure, it's great by their standards, but their standards isn't the one people care about at the end of the day.

These statements go against what I have experienced in the real world. The internet and such is the primary source of information for me, even with my text books sitting next to me on my desk. The ability to look up stuff and self-teaching on-the-fly is much more useful than remembering every last thing that was taught to me in school. That's not to say there's no value - being able to do calculus and such by hand is necessary because you need to understand what's going on, but no one is going to pay me to just sit there and do calculus problems by hand all day. I use a calculator, even though I know how to do long division - it's faster and less error prone. I'm not saying do away with testing altogether, but rather use the real world as delimiter of where emphasis of knowledge and compency should really be put, rather than some professor's pie-in-the-sky notions.

Also, you usually don't get "redos" on an assignment from your boss - it's your responsibility to identify if you don't understand something and to ask for help right away, not after he's "graded your work". Once it's on paper (or checked into a repository), it's expected that you've done what you can to get it right the first time. And the professor can always hand out practice problems or in-class quizzes for the competency check, but the major evaluation should mirror what is desired in the real world.

They don't have to be group projects, they can be individual ones.

I guess my overall comment here is that because professors have a Ph.D. in their discipline they think that means they know what's best on how to teach. That's not true. My opinion is that everyone who wants to teach at a college or university should have some sort of education training (you know, from the Education Department) to dispel a lot of the silly, off-in-the-clouds notions that many professors think are good teaching practices that people in the Education Department would be quick to squash. They also think that because they are the "higher education pinnacle of society" that they automatically know what the real world needs and that the real world conforms to their ideas of what a person of that discipline should know to be useful and functional. Also not true. It's shocking how not true this is. There needs to be more of a vocational emphasis in higher education, and professors need to teach more of the things that they currently like to raise their noses at, but are the very things that industry constantly complains about with fresh graduates and ends up having to do the teaching themselves on the job.

I understand the difficulty, but in the case of advanced math courses, many of them don't have a lot of students in them, which deflates the argument those who would receive an F in a curve probably would have received and F anyway. IMO, the more advanced the course (especially in grad school), the less tests make sense at all for evaluation. It's better to have projects and homework be the primary evaluator since this is more in line with handling "real world" scenarios - which in theory is the point of giving out grades to begin with.

I see your reasoning on how it factors out the variability amongst professors (which is a good thing), but an even better solution is to change the professors themselves - either by forcing a review on their teaching/evaluation methods, or removing the professor altogether. The job market for academia has been hyper-saturated for quite some time now, so it should rather easy to cycle through them until you find good ones.

Bell curves "work" in academic settings because there's hardly any accountability imposed upon tenured professors for how they evaluate students. It's continually shown how grades (as of right now) are a poor predictor of success in the outside world, yet this continues to be ignored in the practical sense in academia.

You miss the point. You can make your case for how competent you are during your interview, but that still won't hold a candle to having X years experience at company Y. Again, I'm talking about getting your foot in the door, not about your performance once you're in.