This is a brief summmary of what people generally said on their evaluations, for anybody curious.
I received 88 evaluations. (Only 87 were still enrolled, but the extra person I assume is genuine.)
You were all very generous in what you wrote. Thank you for all the comments, both critical and supportive!
| 39 | Never attempted to program one |
| 33 | Written only short programs |
| 16 | Already done quite a bit |
| 7 | Extremely stimulating |
| 52 | Interesting |
| 22 | About average |
| 5 | Not very interesting |
| 2 | Mostly an excellent opportunity for sleep |
| 6 | Among the best courses I've even taken |
| 32 | More than average (for PGSS) |
| 43 | About average (for PGSS) |
| 5 | Less than average (for PGSS) |
| 0 | I learned almost nothing. |
As somebody observed on their evaluation last year, ``About average is awfully good at PGSS!'' I'm truly gratified by those that rate the CS core at this level. I think the ``Among the best courses...'' box is a bit outrageous - it's just an extreme that I don't expect anybody to check, but I'm elated that anybody actually checked it.
The following are averaged on a five-point scale from 1 to 5, for both `helpfulness' and `interestingness'. The 1998 data also appears to indicate the relative improvement.
| 1999 | 1998 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| aspect | help | int | help | int |
| assignments | 4.06 | 3.62 | 3.82 | 3.92 |
| lecture | 3.21 | 2.97 | 3.03 | 2.89 |
| textbook | 3.91 | 3.27 | 3.72 | 3.03 |
| Web page | 3.77 | 3.50 | 3.92 | 3.44 |
| cluster help | 4.36 | 4.38 | ||
| other TA help | 4.11 | 4.21 | ||
Happily, the two points most ripe for improvement (lecture and textbook) have improved, although of course there is still room.
Surprising was the decrease in Web page usefulness - I'll put some work into that next year. The decline in interestingness of assignments was offset by the increase in usefulness - I think this reflects an increased emphasis on the written section this year. Finally, the rating for TA help has gone down; I attribute this to the fact that last year the TAs ran a help session for pseudocode, something that did not prove necessary this year.
Lecture was the overwhelming winner here. There wasn't much in the way of concrete examples of what would help - except some people were helpful enough to point out that concrete examples would help lecture.
One person wrote ``Keep that `more assignments' idea to yourself.'' I hope you realize I was half-kidding; there's no way I'd want to add to the PGSS work burden more than I already am. But it really is true that this is the primary limit in what I can teach.
I was happy to hear from a couple that the course fit together wonderfully; they could only recommend that nothing be changed drastically.
Again, on a five-point scale:
| assignment | difficult | interesting |
|---|---|---|
| Pseudocode, Checkbook | 3.17 | 2.63 |
| Crypto, Game, Panthers | 3.26 | 3.66 |
| Sierpinski, Big-O, Go Fish | 4.04 | 3.76 |
The final assignment clearly requires some simplification; the amount of time required tended to range into 6 or 7 hours and often much more. Next year, I'll end up asking a simpler recursion question and simplifying the assignment somewhat (probably providing students with the program's skeleton).
| topic | difficult | interesting |
|---|---|---|
| programming | 2.97 | 3.16 |
| self-study | 3.67 | 3.42 |
| game playing | 3.09 | 3.45 |
| Internet | 3.28 | 3.71 |
| cryptography | 2.99 | 3.64 |
| big-O | 3.79 | 2.57 |
| algorithms | 3.52 | 2.94 |
The most popular answer here was `more programming'. That's not going to happen, unless it's to spend go more slowly over what's currently be covered. There are more concepts I might teach, but I'm not going to to do it, partially because - since programming is a skill more than an idea - it won't be learned unless it appears on an assignment (and I can't hit all the concepts on the assignments as it is), but also partially because I want to avoid giving the idea that computer science is all about programming.
A few people pointed out that game playing seemed a bit out of place, and I agree. I'll consider removing that in favor of more coverage of arrays and recursion (and replacing day we spent on reviewing the topics this year with more Internet and cryptography).
People like the stick figures. A few people asked about careers people pursue with a computer science degree - I added a page to the `announcements' section answering this question. Most of the additional comments here were positive.