Monday, January 09, 2006

Tufts: Absurd Affirmative Action in computer science

Tufts has more female faculty than male even though the great majority of graduates are male! Below are a few excerpts from an article bewailing the small numbers of women students in computer courses and asking how to entice them into computer courses.

As a long-time academic FORTRAN programmer myself, I do know a bit about where the bodies are buried in all this and the utter blindness of the article briefly excerpted below is stark. They would not of course dream of mentioning that programming is pure intelligence and requires the most rigorous logical thinking -- and at the top level of general intelligence and mathematical ability (which are highly correlated) women are comparatively rare. Given their rarity in the top range of mathematical ability, women are in fact probably OVER-represented among computer graduates -- presumably because of affirmative action. There is of course more to computers than programming, but programming is basic. If you can't program or understand at least the basic technicalities, you are not going to be much use elsewhere. The woman mentioned at the end of the excerpt below exempifies what the problem is: A stark lack of technical understanding and knowledge.

Nothing I have said above excludes SOME women from being good with computers. The person who taught me programming was a woman. But expecting women in general to be as good with computers as men in general are is the height of absurdity. There will be always more men than women in computing while work with computers requires the high level of ability that it does today.

And even in normal everyday personal computer support work, the customers are most likely to be women and the techies men. I myself can not remember a time when any adult male has asked me for help to get his PC working properly but I am always helping women to get their computers to behave


"Today, Souvaine chairs the Tufts University computer science department, which has more female professors than male. But few younger women have followed in her generation's footsteps. Next spring, when 22 computer science graduates accept their Tufts diplomas, only four will be women.

Born in contemporary times, free of the male-dominated legacy common to other sciences and engineering, computer science could have become a model for gender equality. In the early 1980s, it had one of the highest proportions of female undergraduates in science and engineering. And yet with remarkable speed, it has become one of the least gender-balanced fields in American society.

In a year of heated debate about why there aren't more women in science, the conversation has focused largely on discrimination, the conflicts between the time demands of the scientific career track and family life, and what Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers famously dubbed ''intrinsic aptitude."

In the wake of the dot-com bust, the number of new computer science majors in 2004 was 40 percent lower than in 2000, according to the Computing Research Association. The field has seen ups and downs before, and some think the numbers for men will soon improve at least a bit. But the percentage of undergraduate majors who are female has barely budged in a dozen years.

A Globe review shows that the proportion of women among bachelor's degree recipients in computer science peaked at 37 percent in 1985 and then went on the decline. Women have comprised about 28 percent of computer science bachelor's degree recipients in the last few years, and in the elite confines of research universities, only 17 percent of graduates are women. (The percentage of women among PhD recipients has grown, but still languishes at around 20 percent.)

When Tara Espiritu arrived at Tufts, she was the rare young woman planning to become a computer scientist. Her father is a programmer, and she took Advanced Placement computer science in high school. Because she scored well on the AP exam, she started out at Tufts in an upper-level class, in which she was one of a handful of women. The same men always spoke up, often to raise some technical point that meant nothing to Espiritu. She never raised her hand. ''I have not built my own computer, I don't know everything about all the different operating systems," she said. ''These people would just sit in the front of the class and ask these complicated questions. I had no idea what they were talking about.""

More here






SOME SPINE SHOWING IN CALIFORNIA

Seniors who do not pass the California High School Exit Exam this year should be allowed to continue their education, but diplomas will be awarded only to students who pass the test, Jack O'Connell, state superintendent of public instruction, announced at a Sacramento news conference Friday morning. Within hours, lawyers who oppose the exam said they will sue the state in the coming weeks to try to lift the exit exam as a requirement for this year's graduating class.

O'Connell's announcement followed a three-month review of possible alternatives to the controversial math and English exam that was adopted in 1999 and is a graduation requirement for the classes of 2006 and beyond. To the disappointment of scholars and advocates who have urged the state to develop another path to graduation for students who fail the test, O'Connell said he believes no alternative exists that would show students have learned material tested on the exam. "I'm convinced the only way to make sure all our graduates have the critical skills is through passage of the high school exit exam," O'Connell said. But he drew a distinction between alternatives to the test and options for students who fail. He laid out ways students who don't pass the exam can continue to go to school and try. They include:

* Enrolling in an additional year of high school or independent study, subject to school board approval.
* Enrolling in an adult school program run by a K-12 school district.
* Enrolling in a charter school.
* Attending a community college that has a diploma completion program.

O'Connell also said students could obtain a diploma equivalent by passing the General Educational Development (GED) test or the California High School Proficiency Exam. And he said he is working with the Legislature to change laws to allow more students to attend adult school, summer school and independent study, and to allow students without diplomas to seek financial aid for community college. "Failure to pass the exam simply means their basic education is not yet complete," O'Connell said.

His decision applies to students in regular education - O'Connell said seniors with disabilities should be exempt from passing the exit exam this year. A lawsuit seeking to waive the exam for special education students goes to court Tuesday. A separate lawsuit - seeking relief from the exit exam for all other students in the senior class - is likely to follow.....

Supporters of the exit exam, including business leaders and education advocates, say the test is so basic - measuring performance on sixth-through 10th-grade skills - that relaxing the requirement would harm students in the long run. They joined Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in applauding O'Connell's position. "This is a test of California's will," said Russlynn Ali, director of Education Trust West, an Oakland group that advocates academic achievement for low-income students. "Do we believe students can learn up to a middle school level education? And will we do what it takes to get them there? If not, let's not pretend we're doing them a favor" by granting diplomas to those who can't pass the test, she said. At the start of the school year, an estimated 90,000 seniors had not yet passed the two-part exam.

More here

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


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