Brown CS 190 Summer Placement Test/Course - What are others' experiences?

profdad2021
Wed, 12 Jul 2017 17:11:41 +0000

Anybody out there an incoming freshman at Brown who is taking this course? Anybody a parent of such a student?

In our family, the experience thus far has been quite negative, driven in large part by communications with course instructors/TAs. For my kid, asking a question in the online portal was out of the question because of the tone of the responses to other student questions. Many, if not most, responses are hyper critical and personally insulting, without much actual useful feedback. So she submitted an assignment and got personal feedback that included a gratuitous personal insult - telling her explicitly that she must not even be trying to learn anything in the course.

This is a university known worldwide for the quality of its undergraduate instruction.

This has caused her to feel, at least for the moment, VERY negatively about CS at Brown. I’m actually grateful that this is occurring over the summer so that I can, in my professor-like fashion, convert it to a parenting teachable moment (my kids HATE it when I use that expression!). But I’m being completely serious - I’m telling her to dig deeper into all of the feedback for the useful information, to consider whether she could be working harder on her own to avoid some of the mistakes that she has apparently made, and to reconsider her reluctance to ask questions up front. That sort of advice, along with the more generic advice to weather the storm and learn from it and remember this experience so that when SHE is in such a leadership position, she is more careful in how SHE communicates feedback.

Thoughts?