Desired level of math for first year computer science students

SadHippo
Sat, 20 Jun 2015 17:08:16 +0000

Try pulling up the bachelor’s of computer science degree plan for your school. This should be easy to find by either browsing your university’s website or typing " (‘school name’) bachelors of computer science degree plan" into google. I say this because the amount you are pushed back by starting at college algebra will be different at one institution than another.

When you see the list of courses on the degree plan, you need to make note of the pre-requisites.

Some things to look into:

1. What is the math sequence for someone starting at College Algebra at your institution?

2. Will the college algebra through pre-calc courses still be able to go anywhere towards your degree? Do they work as elective credits to get towards your 120ish credits needed to graduate?

3. Are there any math courses that are a pre-req for computer science courses? For example, my school has Discrete Mathematics as a pre-req for many computer science courses. Discrete Mathematics has calculus as a pre-req. If your school has this or something similar, then you may run into a situation where you cannot take any computer science courses during, say your second or third semester because you won’t have Discrete Mathematics completed by then (just an example).

The answer to those questions are more institution specific and some of those questions can be answered from pulling up the degree plan as well as the undergraduate catalog. If the college algebra-pre-calc sequence can count as electives, then there is a decent chance you can graduate in four years. What might happen is you will get slowed down initially on your computer science courses because of not having the math yet. In that situation you would likely be taking many of the core curriculum courses while doing math and whatever CS courses you have the pre-reqs for. Then, the last two years you might be loading up on CS courses to account for the fact that you were initially slowed down on CS courses by not having the math. Again, this is just an example and would depend on your institution. Best of luck!