You just can’t be a doctor or a scientist without the proper academic background (Einstein of course being a 1 in a hundred million sort of occurence guy). You just can’t.

My medical course, sure, had issues with how much it really prepared us for the real world, but the biggest comment coming out of there was that having had a dramatically changed course (slanted more towards the vocational side than previously) there was a lot of anatomy and some other quite clinically relevant academic detail we had missed out on.

In fact my biggest disappointment last year was learning that my intern year in many ways was not equipping me adequately for my further training and career development (due to lack of professional development skills, training and support) - even though my academic knowledge HAD.

Similarly my father, a very senior electrical engineer states fairly frequently that the reduced basic sciences content in engineering degrees has led to a drop in long term ability in the workplace.

And then of course there are scientists and researchers- who need the theoretical framework because that is what their everyday work is all about.

In those fields in particular, the job can be picked up “on the job” as it were- and mostly is, whereas the theoretical frameworks cannot.

IT and computer science is a different kettle of fish as I am constantly reminded by my programmer/IT/comp sci friends. On a close to daily basis.

For one thing it is a new field and a lot of its innovations have not been incorporated into academic learning in a worthwhile or applicable manner… and a lot of the theory is still in development anyway. So I can imagine that comp sci degrees just suck balls for that reason.

Anyway that’s my 2 cents. Academia is good for some fields and not very good for others. I think universities provide a very important role but seem to be less applicable to programming than to other professions.

A recurring theme I have picked up on is that it is the tertiary skills you learn at university, such as researching and problem solving, that bring the real benefit. I argue, however, that these skills could also be learned when taught in conjunction with work that is more relevant to the modern workplace.

It seems as though many universities do not have strong enough links with the real world, and I think businesses should be far more involved in the planning and development of a course.

I was lucky enough to find an employer who did me a huge favour by taking me on in a very junior capacity so I could find my feet, and gradually let me move towards what I actually want to be doing (i.e. coding!). Fortunately for me, I’m doing that now, but I still feel the wealth of knowledge that I don’t have, at least some of which I could have learnt at uni.

Ah, well. I suppose there’s really no substitute for actual working, hands-on, in-the-trenches experience. But it’d be nice if education providers did actually try, for example, with internship/work experience programs (which, as far as I’m aware, my course didn’t even offer, let alone require).

Although you raise a point, its validity I would argue.

One could argue that the assignment that you provided doesn’t actually represent majority of work output by a university. I do however agree.

Through my own experience at university, especially in the last few years - the quality of education has slumped. Why? Well like any economist would tell you - incentives!

The main reason for the lecturers to teach [if one may call it that] - is money. Not for the love of their work, not to progress humanity, but pure greed. Now the lecturers aren’t the only ones that are at fault here, its the university that facilitates the delivery of such poorly standardized and managed work.

By focusing the course work to be slanted towards international students , the lecturers, as well as tutors are instructed under the table to ‘take it easy’ on these inbounds. Why? Because they pay $8000 per session, and not $2300 that a domestic student would. Incentives - lets get more students in that pay us more, and we better make sure they pass - otherwise they don’t pay!

Who suffers in the end? The students that come out with these pseudo-degrees, which have been dumbed down.

Cheers,

Roman

I bailed on my Eng/Comp Sci degree years ago in order to pursue my professional career. What I’ve since realised is that in doing that I missed out on a lot of valuable theory. Because of this, I’ve spent a lot of time teaching myself some really important stuff that I would never learn ‘on the job’. It’s required a lot more energy to learn it myself than if I’d taken advantage of the structure of a good CS course to guide me in the first place.

It should go without saying that there’s no substitute for experience, but everyone becomes experienced over time. It’s not so easy to learn the tricky theoretical stuff, especially when one can easily get by without it in practice. (To the detriment of the quality and efficiency of the code.)

I question whether it’s relevant to teach web development in a CS degree. It might be worthwhile in a Business IT degree or a TAFE course, but CS is about learning how computers work, and about the science of computer programming. Once you know that, it’s a doddle to understand how the web works. (Whereas it’d be substantially more difficult to go from ‘just’ understanding the web to something more low level.)

The problem is, that people often don’t know what they know, what they have learnt, how far they have come. They often are totally unaware of many important, high order skills obtained at university: thinking, problem solving, research, analysis, communication, and so on. There is typically a large difference between university graduates and others in these areas. Further, the fact that students can learn “real world skills” quickly on the job after graduation is usually a testament to their education.

Assignments such as this are not meant to mimic specific workplace tasks. They are designed to assess whether particular learning outcomes have been met. Unless you have the mapping of the assessment items against the learning outcomes, it can be difficult to judge an assignment by comparing it to a real world project. Furthermore, the fact that somebody can undertake a certain project in the workplace is not always a valid assessment of their skills and knowledge and how they may be applied in a range of contexts.

For this reason, the assignment asks for a report on the steps because the assessor is not an employer, and so would be interested in how the student goes about the task rather than the completion of the task. Further, the completed task itself could have been done by anybody, not the student — the report helps with the validity of the assessment.

I know you don’t want a flame war, and that is not what I am starting here. You have raised many important issues that should be raised, and it may well be that this assessment is from a course that has little relevance today. However, I am merely giving the perspective from the “academic” side. Doing something is not the same as knowing how to do something. And learning how to be something is not the same as being it.

With subjects like teaching and nursing, while a tertiary education is required and necessary, they spend so much time on immediately pressing tasks that the reflective practice that the university environment encourages is not so practical.

On the other hand in the quantitative sciences (engineering, science, the less fluffy end of psychology &co) lots and lots of education is really required because the rules are complicated and the practice is reflective. TBH if you’re interested in computers, a degree in maths or statistics, engineering, science or cognitive science is probably more useful than a CS degree in the long term, in my opinion.

Actually you see the same thing in business schools > 50% of the academic staff there are refugees from other academic disciplines too.