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by gte910h 5866 days ago
I went to a school (Georgia Tech) where the CS degree is made up of a core and several specializations which actually let you have a huge swath of classes relevant to what you want to do. I had only 2 "math type" CS courses (within the college, I additionally had Combinatorics and "Calculus 3 for CS" which was basically matrix math methods, but they we taught by the actual math department).

I do think this approach where there are lots of specialties (Software Engineering, Game Prgramming, Systems Programming, etc) allows people to get experience and training relevant to where they're going in life.

All that said: I really really really want to see realistic mentored debugging go on in a CS program. I want to see 2 students and one experienced adult, sit down and learn next to someone the ins and out of all the modern debugging techniques (debuggers, binary search, profilers, memory leak detectors, etc). None of the classes had anything like that, and that was the biggest thing missing that comes to mind.

The second biggest thing is realistic estimation methods! Until I read a book on it and practiced a lot, I was horrible at it. Very little was taught on actual methods to make useful estimations.

(Here is a non-aff link to the book who's material I'd like to see covered in a college CS curriculum): http://www.amazon.com/Software-Estimation-Demystifying-Pract...