Software engineering programmes are not computer science programmes
Annals of Software Engineering - Special issue on software engineering education
Computing education in academia: toward differentiating the disciplines
CITC4 '03 Proceedings of the 4th conference on Information technology curriculum
Comparing undergraduate degrees in information technology and information systems
CITC4 '03 Proceedings of the 4th conference on Information technology curriculum
Communications of the ACM - Transforming China
An initiative to attract students to computing
Proceedings of the 38th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Even so with the pieces borrowed from others: dressing an IS program in IT clothing
Proceedings of the 2011 conference on Information technology education
Computing is not a rock band: student understanding of the computing disciplines
Proceedings of the 14th annual ACM SIGITE conference on Information technology education
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We are in a time where computing programs are seeking to differentiate themselves. The ACM suggests that there are five distinct computing disciplines -- Computer Science (CS), Information Technology (IT), Information Systems (IS), Computer Engineering (CE), and Software Engineering (SE). In practice, it seems that there can be extensive overlap between these disciplines. For example, IS is defined by the ACM as computing in an organization context, typically in business while IT is defined as focusing on computing infrastructure and needs of individual users. If each of the different types of programs wishes to identify and attract interested students, it is important to understand if students perceive differences between them. This paper presents the results of a survey to determine if students differentiate between these five disciplines. Computing majors and non-majors were presented with several task descriptions commonly associated with each discipline and asked to identify them as belonging to one of the five disciplines. Data was collected from over 300 students at several different institutions and from a variety of different majors and computing disciplines. The results of the survey are presented along with comparisons of the perceptions of majors and non-majors.