COS 126: General Computer Science will be introducing two new precepts next semester for students with little or no programming experience, undergraduate coordinator for the computer science department Colleen Kenny-McGinley said in an email on Nov. 19.
COS 126 is an introductory course that supposes no prior computer science knowledge on the part of the students taking it.
“Precepts P11 and P12 are 80 minutes long, and the verbiage from the registrar’s indicates that it’s for novices,” Kenny-McGinley said in an interview. The rest of the precepts are 50 minutes long.
Donna Gabai, one of two head preceptors for COS 126, noted that all assignments, tests and exams will be the same for students in all precepts, and that the added time is simply for extra practice in a less intimidating environment. She added that students wondering if they should enroll in the novice course should meet three basic guidelines: little or no prior programming experience, weak quantitative reasoning skills in math or logic and a reluctance to ask questions in a group that may be more knowledgeable.
Gabai also said she was almost positive that the novice precept would be taught by a full-time instructor and not a graduate student.
“This is an experiment, it’s not that this is the new way the course is going to run,” Gabai said. “The concern is always pedagogy, it’s how can we present this material so the greatest number of students can get the most out of it.”
Gabai explained that she and her fellow head preceptor Maia Ginsburg came up with the idea for the novice precepts after assessing comments from the class’s end of term and mid-semester evaluations. She said that despite overwhelmingly positive feedback about the course being well-structured, students who were novices in computer science indicated that they felt intimidated in a class with non-novices. Some students also indicated that they felt novice programmers were outnumbered in the course, she said, which she said surprised her because novices make up at least half of the students in the course.
Out of 355 students enrolled — 320 enrolled in COS 126 and 35 enrolled in ISC 232 — 269 filled out fall 2014 mid-term evaluations and 123 described themselves as having no prior experience, Gabai noted. Of the 123 self-described novices, she said, 35 made comments requesting one or more of the following: longer precepts or slower pace in precepts, separation of novices and/or extra help for beginners.
ISC 232: An Integrated, Quantitative Introduction to the Natural Sciences I meets with COS 126 for the first half of the semester.
“There are students who feel like they are being left behind, so this is an attempt to give them some extra scaffolding,” Gabai said. “It’s also intended to allow them to ask questions feeling that they are among other novices. It’s for people who might be intimidated about asking a question in a room full of what they perceive as whiz kids.”
Gabai noted that self-selecting into novice precepts for introductory level courses is a procedure that has been successful at Harvard.
“I think the idea makes a lot of sense considering the wide array of people mixed in together from different programming backgrounds,”Daniel Wilson ’18, a student planning on taking COS 126 next semester, said.
In past discussions of adding novice precepts to the class, the possibility of higher-level programmers self-selecting precepts structured for novices came up as a concern. While Gabai noted that that is possible, she added that the students, not the preceptors, will control that.
“It is Princeton and people have an honor system that doesn’t just affect assignments and tests, it affects how you deal with yourself, so I’m hopeful that’s not going to be a problem," she added. "But we don’t know, this is an experiment, we’ve never done this before."
Professor Douglas Clark, lecturer and head instructor for COS 126, deferred comment to Gabai and Ginsburg, saying that the precepts were their idea.
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