What do computer scientists do?: a survey of CS and non-CS liberal arts faculty

  • Authors:

  • Hannah Fidoten;Jaime Spacco

  • Affiliations:

  • Knox College, Galesburg, IL, USA;Knox College, Galesburg, IL, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 17th ACM annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

We asked all of the liberal arts faculty who advise undergraduates on course selection at the 14 colleges in the Associated Colleges of the Midwest a series of questions regarding their perceptions of the personality traits of Computer Science (CS) students, topics they think are covered in CS classes, and their overall impressions of CS. Our goal was to assess empirically the hypotheses that (1) many non-CS faculty do not really know what computer science is, and (2) many non-CS faculty are unaware of the differences between CS and Information Technology (IT). We received over 250 survey responses, which revealed that, among non-CS faculty, only 9% disagree or are neutral that CS should even be part of a liberal arts curriculum, but 32% think CS students learn to administer computers and computer networks, while 34% believe that CS students are taught to use Microsoft products in the classroom. However, over 95% of non-CS faculty also recognize the importance of both programming and algorithms to the study of computer science. The overall data suggests that a majority of non-CS faculty in the Associated Colleges of the Midwest have a a basic understanding of CS, while the remainder have an overly broad definition of CS (i.e. they think that CS includes IT).