<p>@Bounce,</p>
<p>You may be on to something. Since I was a Computational Math major who almost doubled with CS, I was able to take both the Discrete Structures sophomore-level course (not required by math majors at the time) and later on a junior/senior course in Combinatorics. Of course those two courses have a lot of overlap but I recall that the junior/senior level Combinatorics course pretty much covered the Discrete Structures topics in like 5 weeks.</p>
<p>That has me thinking, maybe Discrete Structures should be given more meat and throw in more proof-writing and then make ALL the “computational type majors” (comp math and CS, etc) take Combinatorics in junior year. That would allow students to be introduced to proofs very early.</p>
<p>One note about the Advanced Calculus course at MSU during my time there. Very few of us got A’s on our first try. Many of us had to either drop the course and take it the next semester…or eek out a B- or B grade (we had intermediate letter grades).</p>
<p>I myself took two sections of the course at different times of the day and dropped the one with the lowest midterm grade (midterms were usually near when courses could be dropped with only losing 10 or 20% of money).</p>