What are the best colleges for computer science?

Sam_Lee
Tue, 19 Jul 2005 18:24:26 +0000

Sakky,

I agree that the comparison isn’t fair because there are more students in UIUC. However, UIUC lacks grade inflation and I doubt there would be many with GPA around/lower than 3.0 (which is a sizeable number because of lack of grade inflation) applying to Stanford. Also, im_blue did mention about the rigor of of Duke’s program not being on par with UIUC, MIT, CMU, and Berkeley. Based on my very superficial knowledge about the field and intuition, it looks to me CS is one of those fields where there can be quite a bit of disparity between different programs. I took intro to C at Stanford and it was hard. Your first assignment isn’t gonna be writing “Hello, World!” at Stanford!!! CS is one of the majors for which you are not gonna get a break from grade inflation at Stanford. Your codes either work or don’t and the assignments aren’t easy. CS is not about studying books; it’s kinda about talent also and I see the talent level at Stanford is very high. Maybe for many fields, you learn just about the same stuff no matter where you go. But for CS, I can see how someone not trained rigorously before can have a hard time at top CS grad schools such as Stanford.