[andrewingram]

For my degree (Computer Science at Warwick), the first year did count towards my final results. Even without it counting, I feel it would have been fairly difficult to adequately teach Computer Science without the 'extra' year at the start.

[ecaroth]

So how much were you able to actually get into CS your first year?? I was limited to mostly programming 1 & 2... you couldn't get into any higher level CS studies until you had those two classes completed, and you couldn't take them at the same time. That led to a lot of fun side projects, no doubt, but that was when I wasn't falling asleep in my under-water basket weaving class. I often wonder if a technical program at a computer-specific school would have yielded the same results for much less dime.

[andrewingram]

Hm, if i recall correctly my first year had: - A basic mathematics course, took us through some of the harder A-Level (pre-uni) stuff and a few more advanced things - Discrete mathematics, set theory and all that jive. - An introductory programming course, it covered basic Java programming and introduced OOP. Coursework was to write the algorithm for solving a maze - A basic hardware and lower-level concepts course - Data structures, ie what ones are available and their efficiencies - A unix programming module, basically we made some dead simple command line programs - Some functional programming (we used SML)

I hadn't really done any programming pre-university (other than some trivial Delphi apps that aren't really worth mentioning). So nearly all of this was new to me.

The second year was basically more of the same but harder. The 3rd and 4th years were where we got the bulk of the credit for the degrees, but we also got the most freedom over what modules we took. In the first two years, about 80% of the modules were considered 'core'.

[ecaroth]

Wow... you were already in discreet math & shell programming in your first year. I was stuck with calc 1 & 2, and didn't get to touch a unix shell until my second year "networking" class where we spent two months setting up subnets. I didn't get to touch on any harware stuff until year 3, where we mapped out ALUs, RAM chips, etc. Sounds like your universities CS program had it's shit together a little more than mine. Oh well though.. the lack of interesting topics for the first 2 years only drove me to learn on my own and do side projects, which ended up ok in the end.