And the new job I apply for the day after that may require a fluency in Hindustani, and after that the microbiology of cheese curd production or an intimate familiarity with the physics of left-handed paper clips. Why not make learning these subjects mandatory for a C.S. degree as well?
Knowledge of these subjects has been precisely as useful to me as a software engineer as has calculus – which is to say: not at all. And that’s held true for a score of challenging and fascinating new jobs. No potential or actual employer has ever even mentioned calculus! (Or cheese curds, for that matter).
I agree that there must be educational standards in most curricula, but the university should limit course requirements to those subjects that are most likely to be required by the students in those curricula.
A college student is an adult, and should be treated like one. It should be their responsibility to decide how best to “broaden” their own educations. It is highly patronizing for others to claim that they know “better” what subjects should be studied!
It is the college’s place to make minimum requirements. Their reputation is besed on the knowledge of their graduates.
If they change their requirements, employers take notice. Also, very few people find calc easy, actually I did. If only one or two schools drop calc as a requirement, they will get a flood of applicants who can’t pass calc. This does not bode well for the average performance of their graduates.
The way to for a student to avoid this issue is to go to a community college for and AA and then to a school that only has upper level classes. University of Baltimore is one example. There they have a business program that is thought of as very progressive. Many of their instructors are experienced businessmen rather than scholarly types. However, it is a difficult enough program that the “I can’t pass calc” types do not make it through this either. This program may be the wave of the future but you were born too soon. Sorry.
If men had wings,
and bore black feathers,
few of them would be clever enough to be crows.
Christ on a stick, VileOrb, just two paragraphs above I wrote:
Of course “It is the college’s place to make minimum requirements”! But the key word here is minimum!
The calculus boosters that have posted here have tried three main tactics:
A) Calculus is required for most people working in the fields under debate.
Certainly not for C.S., it’s not! I’ve never needed it, and I’ve never heard of any of my colleagues needing it. And I’ve worked in the forefront of some cutting edge scientific and technical projects. While there may be a few exceptions, argument A appears to be false.
B) Ok, so even if it’s not useful to most people, everyone should be required to know it anyway.
The problem with this approach is that it is highly arbitrary. There are probably a great many professors out there that think that everyone should be required to study their field too, many of which would have just as strong a justification! Why not require them all?
The other problem with B is that it is so offensively paternalistic and sanctimonious, and treats an adult college student like an 8’th grade child.
C) There’s also the minor variant that says that even though you’ve never needed it before, you might need it tomorrow. My responses to the previous two arguments rebut this one just as easily.
And finally, for all you “horizon broadeners”: you can’t “educate” someone who resents being forced into it. By coercing someone into studying something, you’re creating a psycho-social environment that resists genuine learning. I seem to recall some old adage about horses and water…
The thing is a bachelors degree must prepare a student not only for a possible career as a economist or whatever but must also prepare the student for a variety of post-graduate degrees. I once helped a Ph.D. of Economics write computer program to process a large database of figures to test a theory he had about possibly predicting large corporation budgets farther into the future. I used no calc but, I assure you, he used it in developing the theory and in fine tuning the equations.
If you want an education that only prepares you for a specific career, you don’t want college.
If men had wings,
and bore black feathers,
few of them would be clever enough to be crows.
====
As for high school, my beef is not with calculus being taught as much as it is with other things not being taught. We progress students through the Algebra/Geometry/ Calculus death march as if there is no other mathematics. An absolutely required HS course in my world would be a Practical Math course. (My HS had one, but it was something the people who failed Pre-Calc took and consisted of addition facts with dollar signs in front of all the numbers.) This would teach people how to use the years of number manipulation we’ve taught them–how to balance a checkbook, how to figure their gas mileage, figure the square footage of their house, understand statistics they read in the paper, etc.
True. My BF’s high school required not only an accounting course, but shop and home ec (which included Personal Finance) for all students, male, female, purple, or blue. Required. Typing too, but that’s a much more common requirement. I wish to goodness my high school (renowned the city over for having at least 20 National Merit Recognized students of one degree or another in each graduating class of ~400) had required home ec and shop. Don’t get me wrong, I did learn a lot of good practical things there (being made to reprove all the geometrical axioms leads to critical thinking too), but some of these kids were remarkably smart, impeccably ‘educated’ college-bound people who don’t know one end of a drill from the other. About the only ones with practical physical skills were the ones who volunteered with Habitat for Humanity on their own time. And the kids who went to El Salvador on ‘social justice’ missions learned about nutrition and household planning, but if you didn’t feel like springing for the ticket you were butt out of luck.
Thank you. Another data point supporting my position.
Just like the Ph.D’s in aerodynamics at NASA or the Ph.D’s in physics at JPL did when I worked with them. The question is: So? They had their specialties and I had mine, and graduate school requirements are graduate school requirements. And lest you missed my earlier posts, I did study calculus at university: I simply never needed it, any more than I needed the chemistry I studied. Why not make chemistry mandatory for all curricula?
Please try not to be so insulting and condescending. I say that college is a place for adults to pursue their passion for learning unhindered by unnecessary and arbitrary requirements, and you reply that I should have gone to a trade school. Your reasoning is specious, at best. APB9999 replies:
Calculus is useful in the same way that History, and Foreign Languages, and British Literature are useful. That is to say learning it makes you a better person. Learning is not all about immediate practicality, or even acquiring knowledge. Learning is about being able to deal with the world in better ways in a general sense, as opposed to a specific sense. Sure, you may not have to solve integral equations on a daily basis, but calculus teaches you how to look at change in the world and understand what change means. Philosophically, it’s quite enlightening to know the rudiments of the mechanics of change, and analyzing that change. Since the world is not a static place, but an ever changing one, understanding that how change in general operates (as opposed to how to solve a differential equation) is quite useful.
In the scope of learning, it’s with great wonderment that I find people look at it as a currency, like time, and that they feel that learning anything that isn’t immediately applicable must be a frivoulous waste of time that could be valuably used elsewhere. Learning is about gaining a greater understanding of the world around us. It is accomplished not by learning facts or processes but by gaining wisdom. Anyone who takes education for the former and not the latter is doomed to not learn much of anything at all.
For practicality, my study of numbers has given me flunt understanding in terms of money.
I took no business course, but I am able to count simple interest, compound interest (semi-annually, quarter, monthly, daily, hourly, and yes, even continually) and can balance a checkbook without having to take a class. I can easily derive the equations for these from scratch from my understanding of numbers.
As for inferiority, if you can’t grasp the meaning of percentages, accrued interest, and probability and statistics from scratch but instead have to look it up in some reference, you are inferior.
Looks as if we need a new topic in the BBQ Pit. You could call it "Dueling Banj / I mean “Dueling Polynomials” or something.
Play nice here, though, k?
And what do you do when you don’t have a scientific or business calculator? Or better yet, how do you know which function you actually need on your calculator?
What’s important in this debate - in education and learning - isn’t knowing how to do calculus, it’s finding out why things happen the way they do. And calculus is major key to understanding a lot about what happens in the physical world.
It seems that you are arguing pretty vehemently that calculus shouldn’t be taught to CS majors because you have a number of data points where CS grads don’t use it.
A couple of observations:
In what school of your university was your CS degree given? In mine, it was the School of Engineering. Personally, I think it would be criminal for anybody to get an engineering degree and not know calculus.
Surely, as a CS grad, you know that computers and mathematics are highly intertwined? To me, it only seems natural that one learns calculus so that you can better appreciate numerical methods classes.
What should be the minimum set of classes that a CS major should have to take? I think the “I don’t have to use it in my job” line is incredibly short-sighted and misleading. What CS course do you use in your job. I had tons of courses that were required and that I don’t use at all. For example, I learned Pascal, C, Scheme, ML, compiler design and operating system design. Of these, I have only used C after graduation, and now I don’t even use that. I could easily turn the question around and ask, “why did my school require me to take any courses?”
After reading my response, I want to clarify some things (I think I posted in a flame-bait style).
On issue (1) - the reason I asked about the school is that I know when I got my degree there was serious talk about moving the Computer Science department out of the School of Engineering. I’m not sure where it would have gone, but as long as it stayed in the engineering school, Calc was going to be a required course.
On issue (2) - this is a bit related to issue (1). I believe that many smaller schools have (or had) the computer science department as part of the mathematics department. If this is the case, one can easily see why Calc is/was required.
On issue (3) - the reason I ask about what courses should be required is that using the test of whether or not you need it on the job is very, very difficult. Unless one had a job set up for life, I can’t even imagine how a school could only require courses that they knew would be necessary for those jobs.
Bpaulson, good points. I think ambushed won’t buy it. Here’s a quote:
“I say that college is a place for adults to pursue their passion for learning unhindered by unnecessary and arbitrary requirements, and you reply that I should have gone to a trade school. Your reasoning is specious, at best.”
Again, flame bait. Specious must be one of the top 10 insulting words in the dictionary. I will attempt to refrain myself. Hmm… passion for learning? I present the following possibilities to anyone with a “passion for learning.”
You can go to college and take whatever courses you want(provided you keep your grades up and take any prerequisites necessary) until you hit the 300 semester-credit mark. At that point, I figure it’s time to give someone else a turn. This will not earn you a degree, but it will teach you a lot. Employers are becoming less and less particular about the degrees held by programmers. Other jobs usually require a degree, but this is not the fault of the universities.
You can build your own degrees at most universities. You just have to submit written justification and get it signed by the right people. Not always easy to do, but possible.
Some support info and an attempt to establish credibility-
At 300+ credits (16 years of collegiate study), I was told I had to graduate within a year or get out. I looked into writing my own degree but found a degree called Language, Technology, and Culture in the English department. It was close enough to what I was looking for that I decided to go with it. So, I ended up with a BA instead of the BS I wanted, but it hasn’t been that big of a deal. And, now I can go back for grad school.
I’m a computer engineer, and I have used calculus on many, many occasions.
I wrote a text-retrieval system, and when researching optimal searching algorithms much of the literature used calculus in minimax problems to discover efficient searches.
I worked as a scientific programmer in a chemistry lab, using Fourier transforms. Calculus!
I wrote a some flight simulation software. Calculus!
I now work as a professional gambler, playing poker and blackjack while I take time off from programming. Whaddya know, in learning to be a GAMBLER of all things, I studied a book called “Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic”. You can’t understand any of it without calculus. While there are many professional poker players who do not know calculus, I have a big edge over them, and am better able to make rational decisions.
Much of the work done today with advanced computer graphics and audio (MP3, photoshop, etc) requires things like Fourier transforms, which cannot be learned without calculus.
Frankly, I simply can’t understand a degreed programmer who would make an anti-calculus argument. So much of what you learn in your 3rd and 4th years requires calculus to understand it, so even if you don’t use calculus in your job later on, you needed it to learn the stuff that you do use.