What follows isn't a request for advice. It's correspondence (edited for length) letting me know about a potentially disturbing situation: a data-processing degree program that doesn't require any demonstration of technical proficiency of any kind.
Read it. Then, if you have firsthand knowledge of the subject, please post a comment (preferred) or send me an email to let me know if this has become common or is an outlier that doesn't represent a trend. When I've accumulated enough responses to have a sense of the true situation, I'll publish the results.
- Bob
Dear Bob ...
My daughter was (unexpectedly) "good with computers" (to use her mother's words), but struggled to find a major in college at which she could excel. She preferred to handcode HTML rather than use an HTML editor (at the time, something like Dreamweaver), but wasn't one of those bright young people already writing programs in C by the time she was in junior high school. Still, she was "good with computers."
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Imagine my surprise (and, as it turned out, her relief) that she could get a four-year undergraduate degree in "data processing" without having to write a single program in any language! All such assignments were routinely structured as group (team) exercises; it turned out that the groups who found a natural affinity for each other always had at least one member who could do all or most of the work for each assignment. There were no tests as I think both you and I understand the concept. Everything was a "project," and each team was responsible for its own effort.
To give you a sense of the assignments: The "lab" project for the Server Administration course she took consisted of little more than the groups separately installing Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 on an ordinary PC, either at school or at someone's home. That was it -- just install it. The instructor did not even check that the installation was done correctly; he simply took their word for it, apparently.
