How Harvey Mudd College is closing the computer science gender gap: "Know-it-alls in any section are told to cool it so no one is intimidated." Humiliating males empowers females?

CrossHook · 2013-05-06T19:44:52+00:00

Stifling bright students for the benefit of slow students who don't know the material will undoubtedly bring down the academic standing of the entire class.

This is pretty much the worst possible strategy you could adopt as a teacher.

AndrewLevin · 2013-05-06T19:35:19+00:00

The college mission statement does not mention anything about humiliating strong male candidates in order to please mediocre female candidates:

Harvey Mudd College seeks to educate engineers, scientists, and mathematicians well versed in all of these areas and in the humanities and the social sciences so that they may assume leadership in their fields with a clear understanding of the impact of their work on society.

Questions: Are strong female candidates also "told to cool it" if they give too many correct answers? Or is this practice reserved only for males? Also, if a weak male candidate feels intimidates by something, does the school move heaven and earth to make him feel better?

literallyschmiteraly · 2013-05-06T20:10:42+00:00

I've been reading these types of articles for 20 years, and they always sound the same. It's like reading the Watchtower and Awake.

2013-05-06T22:02:22+00:00

They're getting only about 18 percent of the bachelor's degrees in computer science, and in the workplace their numbers aren't much higher.

Doesn't it make sense that the workplace numbers and the number of degrees received in that field are roughly the same? If women want to be more involved in the workplace, they have to enroll in the classes that get them there.

HMCgrad2011 · 2013-05-16T00:59:15+00:00

I went to HMC and took a few of their computer science courses. You guys are reading way too into a small portion of this article and taking it out of context. Males are not humiliated. Females are not super-encouraged.

The CS department has gotten a lot more people to major in it (both male and female) over the past few years by making their introductory course much more approachable for those who have never taken a CS course before.

Now before you get all "oh that must be so easy for anyone with prior exposure to the subject" they have 2 different tracks for the intro course - one for more experienced students, and one for less experienced. In fact, I think this past year they may have even added a third (?) but I'm not sure, I graduated in 2011.

The benefit of this is that the people who are more experienced are separated from the newbies in lecture. Thus, everyone is challenged to an appropriate degree. Furthermore, you can switch between the two tracks if you decided you needed either more of a challenge, or that the advanced track was too advanced.

THis is what the article is talking about. There are more women in CS at HMC because the intro course is really well designed and gets people interested who may not have initially been drawn to the field (due to lack of exposure or what have you).

They do not "humiliate" males and "empower" females.

PimpinLarge · 2013-05-06T21:01:59+00:00

It's rather annoying that they ditched the weed-out class just to get more women in.

They also spectacularly fail to explain how the class goes about it's weeding.

We had a class that was a bit like that - UNIX. It wasn't intended to be a weed-out class, but a lot of people found it very difficult (I don't understand why, I got through it pretty easily), so a lot of people had to re-take the class or left the course entirely.

Ma99ie · 2013-05-07T00:35:14+00:00

God forbid you take an active interest in the subject. Better to shut up men to allow "intimidated" women to be coddled into the subject.

2013-05-07T00:48:12+00:00

"Women and men work through problems in very different ways," says Luke Mastalli-Kelly. "Men will oftentimes just try to pound through a problem, and then one of the women will be, 'Wait, hold on, how about if I ask this question?' "

Laughed at that. She can't possibly believe this is true.

king_of_the_ayleids · 2013-05-07T01:53:35+00:00

The idea that a course has too be fun as a way of keeping women interested is ridiculous, and insulting to the intellect and persistence of any women in academia.

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