How is computer science at NYU Poly?

jparent6
Thu, 16 Apr 2015 18:09:19 +0000

With apologies to CC, I’m going to copy most of my reply from http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/tufts-university/1761659-tufts-v-nyu-for-engineering-cs.html#latest to here. But first:

1. Are students generally satisfied with this school for CS?

What I can tell you is that none of the four CS majors from my son’s freshman suite expect to finish their education at Poly, and that includes one kid who was on nearly full scholarship. The last two (including my son) at this point are not planning on registering for their Junior year.

Before they started breaking out statistics, NYU Poly had a 60% graduation rate in six years, which should (have been for us) a read flag. Right now my son is very frustated and says the school hates its students.

The NYU Poly intro CS courses are bad. (I feel qualified to say this, after reviewing the course material, since I have 40 years industry experience and an MIT CS degree myself.) I can get very specific about this if you’d like. The first course – CS1114 is supposed to be Introduction to Computer Science, but its really about memorizing obscure artifacts of Python (from this course one would think the most important principle of computer science is what the * operator does when used on strings), never relating them to general CS principles. The problem sets are entirely uninteresting – mostly meaningless text manipulation. By the end of semester they’re doing exciting things like keeping bank balances.

The second course on Object Oriented programming (CS1124) has similar problems, focusing on the edge cases of C++, rather than serious principles of Object Oriented design. But that course is even harder (I was aghast when in the freshman orientation the admissions lady actually admitted that 30% of the students flunk this course, yet they’ve done nothing to change it.) My son lost 15% on his first exam for not putting “const” declarations on methods with no side-effects (i.e. his code was completely correct, but with the const declaration the compiler might be able to optimize it slightly better). he lost more points because he wrote a for loop with {} around the single statement that was in the body of the for loop (again, his code was completely correct – this time they took points off for a stylistic issue). Mind you, this is all while writing code with a pencil in a test booklet.

Don’t even get me started on the required two-semester writing program. They’ve turned it over the NYU, so the engineering students are now being forced to write literature criticism graded by frustrated Adjunct faculty (read: English majors, who couldn’t get real faculty appointments anywhere, being paid a pittance to teach these courses).

As far as earning stastitics go – my son’s roommates stayed in NYC and they’re working as programmers. Didn’t need Poly’s placement dept and didnt need a degree. Consider the high salary statistics may have something to do with a lot of these kids working in NY where the cost of living and salaries are high – whether they graduate or not!