Re: “Many UC Berkeley upper division computer science students can’t even write for loops or multiply matrices”—I was one of the most active TAs (teaching assistant) at UC Berkeley 2012-15 (I TA’d six times for five distinct courses, three of which were upper division) and this does not accurately describe the student population during that time. You’d have a hard time passing the intro courses without being able to write for loops (maybe you pass 61A but I expect you don’t get through 61B unless you’re cheating).
If you look at the screenshot, it suggests that this is a post-COVID issue because the students took the lower division courses P/NP—that sounds much more believable (particularly since I’d guess that courses lowered their standards for “passing” during COVID), but doesn’t imply some general update about UC Berkeley CS students overall.
I also suspect there’s more context that isn’t captured in the screenshot, but didn’t find a link to the source.
(This is not much direct evidence, mostly just sharing a fun anecdote)
Somewhat hilariously I think this was kind of true about me when I took CS188 at Berkeley. I got really into Lisp before I got to Berkeley, and then took the CS61AS lisp version of the class, and then did indeed write in-retrospect really horrifyingly bad code that instead of using for loops used recursion for all of my assignments in CS 188.
I did recently look into the code I wrote during that time and found it quite bad, and I probably didn’t actually know the syntax for a for-loop in python, and I was among one of the better coders in my class (ignoring my terrifying tendency to write everything in terrible LISP).
Re: “Many UC Berkeley upper division computer science students can’t even write for loops or multiply matrices”—I was one of the most active TAs (teaching assistant) at UC Berkeley 2012-15 (I TA’d six times for five distinct courses, three of which were upper division) and this does not accurately describe the student population during that time. You’d have a hard time passing the intro courses without being able to write for loops (maybe you pass 61A but I expect you don’t get through 61B unless you’re cheating).
If you look at the screenshot, it suggests that this is a post-COVID issue because the students took the lower division courses P/NP—that sounds much more believable (particularly since I’d guess that courses lowered their standards for “passing” during COVID), but doesn’t imply some general update about UC Berkeley CS students overall.
I also suspect there’s more context that isn’t captured in the screenshot, but didn’t find a link to the source.
(This is not much direct evidence, mostly just sharing a fun anecdote)
Somewhat hilariously I think this was kind of true about me when I took CS188 at Berkeley. I got really into Lisp before I got to Berkeley, and then took the CS61AS lisp version of the class, and then did indeed write in-retrospect really horrifyingly bad code that instead of using for loops used recursion for all of my assignments in CS 188.
I did recently look into the code I wrote during that time and found it quite bad, and I probably didn’t actually know the syntax for a for-loop in python, and I was among one of the better coders in my class (ignoring my terrifying tendency to write everything in terrible LISP).