Tufts v. NYU for Engineering/CS

jparent6
Thu, 16 Apr 2015 17:48:00 +0000

As a parent from the Boston area with a kid at NYU Poly, I can tell that there’s no comparison. Go to Tufts. 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 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).

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).

Before they started breaking out statistics, NYU Poly had a 60% graduation rate in six years (vs. Tufts’ 90%). Of the four kids in my son’s freshman suite, two have already left the school, and the other two (including my son), don’t plan on re-registering for next semester. My son simply says the school hates its students.