Educational Expectations

Yesterday afternoon during my office hours I witnessed something that was truly sad. A University College student in my Visual Basic class asked for some help in doing a couple of assigned programming problems. The course is intended for Decision and System Sciences students in the Haub School as part of their major and normally would be taken after basic mathematics and statistics courses are taken, but sometimes they might not have one or the other of the prerequisites. We have UC students who have been granted credit for these courses from other schools, particularly junior colleges. In teaching this course I must assume a few fundamentals. I was not prepared for what happened yesterday.

The first problem involved a simple program for calculating total prices when there are discounts based upon volume. The student complained of being unable to get the result to show up on the screen. So I asked to see where it was in the program that the result was displayed. Sheepishly it was acknowledged that the calculation wasn't done yet, so I asked the student to describe to me how to solve this problem:

A product sells for $100 and there is a 10% discount. What is the selling price?

The bewildered student sat there with a blank stare, mumbling about once knowing how to solve this problem. I carefully wrote down the equations and the outline of the code for that calculation.

We moved onto the next problem. In this one, the program was to take three grades from student tests, calculate the average and select the appropriate letter grade. I thought his problem was with the second step which involves the use of a complex logical expression or an esoteric SELECT CASE statement. No, the problem was with the first part.

I asked: If you got a 100 and a 50 on two tests, what would your average score be?

Again, no response. There was no understanding of the underlying process of computing an average.

Many of my programming students do not have the talent or interest in become expert at the nuance of programming and system development and so we help them achieve an understanding of the difficulty that programmers and developers face. Others go on to become crack programmers.

Where did we go wrong in giving my student the false hope that he/she had the ability to do either?