This Is CS50: The Rich Harvard CS Students, They Are Different

theodp writes: "Let me tell you about the very rich," wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Rich Boy. "They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand." And, if you studied computer science at your cold-and-heartless State U., you could be forgiven for saying the same about rich CS students after reading KQED's coverage of the coddled-by-comparison life of Harvard CS50 students. From the article: "[Prof. David] Malan’s class [CS50] attracts students who have never taken computer science before, as well as kids who have been coding a long time. His goal with this diverse group of learners is to create a community that’s equal and collaborative. One way he does this is by asking students to self-identify by comfort level. Those groups become different section levels, and they sometimes get different homework, but harder assignments are not worth more credit. Malan said recently that the 'less comfortable' group has dominated his 700-person course. 'At the end of the day all students are treated with the same expectations,' said Malan, speaking at the Building Learning Communities conference in Boston. Students are graded based on each individual’s growth; Malan and his team of teaching assistants don’t use absolute measures when assigning grades. Instead, they look at scope, how hard the student tried, correctness, how right the work was, style, how aesthetic the code is, and design, which is the most subjective. When it’s time to assign grades, Malan and his teaching fellows have lots of in-depth conversations about how each student has improved relative to where he or she started. And since computer code is particularly easy to steal off the web, Malan has a 'regret clause' for his course 'to encourage and allow students to come forward if they made a bad decision that historically is very hard to take back. “We encourage them to come forward.' If a student did cheat, but uses the regret clause, he or she can still be penalized, but Malan won’t escalate the incident to the university level. He understands that sometimes stressed-out students, many of whom are perfectionists pushing themselves in a completely new area of study, act on their anxieties against their better judgment." If you can't pony up the estimated $63,025-a-year sticker price to take "the quintessential Harvard (and Yale!) course" on campus, you can at least play CS50x — The Home Game on EdX for free (Malan is pretty amazing)!