I try not to get overly-annoyed at this kind of thing too, but to me it just demonstrates an incredible lack of self-drive, or curiosity, especially in the CS domain.
If the students are genuinely curious, there is nothing to stop them learning about pretty much any topic in CS - really. There are few university subjects where the entire syllabus is freely available online in almost every format imaginable the way CS often is, and very often the computer you already have works just fine to learn it on.
When I was a kid, this wasn't something I could afford or that my parents were willing to pay for. I did oftentimes use the library computers, but they were locked down (of course, half the fun was finding ways around that.)
I was very lucky that my middle school (in a fairly low-income area) was given a grant by NASA that allowed them to supply all of us with laptops during the school year. I surely wouldn't be where I am today without it.
In some respects, a modern mobile phone has more in common with minicomputers than minicomputers had with computers before keyboards and file systems. Being able to interact with computers in a meaningful way transformed computers from programmable calculators and data processing machines into something entirely different. I would imagine that more people have seen those archaic computers in museums than during their service life simply because there was no need to interact with those computers back in the day. Even a web developer has more direct control over a server in a data centre than most early programmers had over early computers. (At least those used in businesses. Computers used for research were a different story.)
Ya, I have to agree. Although you may learn, it's clearly not the primary intention of a University to teach anything but your ability to do whatever it takes to score well or do publishable research.
>To keep that line of reasoning going, what is the purpose of the university, if you're supposed to learn everything on your own?
It's not that you have to learn everything on your own though, it's that if you enter a program without having some understanding of the basics, you're going to have to pay to take a bunch of remedial classes.
It'd be like going for a mathematics degree when the highest class you took in high school was algebra, where the normal degree students would be starting with Calc 3 or Differential Equations. You might be ok in the major or you might not, but you don't even know enough to start on the path at that point.
A good CS course isn't really about programming in that sense. A CS degree is to programming what a maths degree is to, say, statistics methods, or at least it should be. You are expected to learn the “hum-drum details”¹ yourself (perhaps with guidance of course) or already know some of them, with the course exploring wider or deeper concepts (the why, wherefore, and therefore, of those details).
Your maths degree probably did as much as a CS degree would have done (expanding your ability to learn, analyse & problem solve, etc.) allowing you to learn the technical details of programming on your own. CS was essentially birthed from a branch or two of mathematics, after all!
People who want/need a programming course (which is perfectly valid, I don't mean to denigrate the position in the slightest) are probably not best served by a traditional CS degree.
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[1] “hum-drum” sounds a bit too negative for what I was intending, but my brain isn't firing on all cylinders this morning and I can't think of a better term for what I was thinking there!
Not everything, but university is a big shift towards self directed learning.
Lack of understanding coming into the courses causes issues, when I started we had to delay things because some students hadn't encountered matrixes and the maths around them.
So sure, they can teach these things but it adds to what they already are trying to teach. A lowered base means less of the advanced content can be taught.
CS has always been a lot more like the arts/music than most other majors, in this regard. If you don’t come in with way more knowledge about and skill with computers than the median college-bound high school graduate, you’re gonna have a bad time.
It’s kinda shitty, but for a long time PC gaming as a gateway drug for young kids let universities just assume a fat pipeline of already-computer-savvy applicants.
If the students are genuinely curious, there is nothing to stop them learning about pretty much any topic in CS - really. There are few university subjects where the entire syllabus is freely available online in almost every format imaginable the way CS often is, and very often the computer you already have works just fine to learn it on.