[sdiy] Should GaTech go bananas?

[Aaron Lanterman]

On Thu, 29 Dec 2005, john mahoney wrote:

> This is sad, coming from someone at Georgia Tech. For those who don't know,
> the Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the top (like, Top 10)
> engineering colleges in the U.S.

GaTech, itself, is excellent. I'm incredibly happy and honored to be on 
the faculty here.

Alas, I'm afraid my observations about students are probably not unique to 
Georgia Tech... probably any other large state school has the same issues. 
(A lot of people think we're private for some reason - probably since 
M.I.T., which I like to think of as the Georgia Tech of the North, is 
private - but we're part of the Georgia state univ. system). State schools 
wind up taking in a lot more students than private schools typically 
though.

Overall, students just seem to be coming in with weaker and weaker 
preparation in high school.

The other issue is that people come into their majors with no real sense 
of why they're interested in it, if they are at all. Very few EEs come in 
having ever built anything, or taken anything apart to see the circuits, 
the sort of stuff I liked to do when I was a kid. Nowadays when I ask 
"does anyone have a ham radio license," I might get 1 or 2 hands out of 
120 students. This last semester when I asked, I got zero. Also, very few 
CS majors come in with _any_ programming experience at all, which I find 
flabbergasting.

I probably shouldn't be coming off as so negative - again, the top, say, 
50% of our students are top-notch, and most the rest do O.K. If I could 
just shave off the bottom, say, 10-20%, oh, the things we could teach the 
rest... I may have a skewed perspective since of course the students I 
usually see the most of are the ones that are the most confused.

- Aaron

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