I'm curious how much Calculus as a prerequisite is a barrier to entry for students. CS as a topic is not hard, but a lot of students are blocked from entry with fairly rigorous Calculus requirements.
I dont get why so many people want to drop calculus from computer science curriculum. Calculus is necessary for basic science and math literacy. People act like it's graduate level math and not something easily learned by any somewhat studious high schooler. 4 year CS programs are supposed to give you an education which is a foundation for wherever your career takes you not teach you to be a create-react-app code monkey for life. What if you come across the need or desire to do anything related to science or engineering?
I'm 60, and have never used any calculus on the job. I did need to relearn some linear algebra when doing game programming, but these days most of the heavy lifting is done in the game engine for us.
Nothing I've done on the job involves deep computer science. There are people who need to know that stuff, but they are specialists. Building CRUD servers or web frontends uses very little of what I studied in college, beyond basic understanding of data structures and algorithmic complexity.
I'm glad I learned CS, and wish I had learned more of it, but it should not be a requirement for getting a code-monkey job.
I'm sorry, but if you are unable to understand the basics of calculus and discrete math, then you should not be in a Computer Science program (with emphasis on the "science" part). CS isn't just programming - it's the theory of how computers work and math is an integral part of that. Just because you don't use it every day in the job itself doesn't mean that the information is useless.
While I've certainly found calculus useful on many occasions, I don't think calculus is a particularly important requirement for understanding how computers work.
On the other hand, calculus prerequisites are a filter that filters out anyone who might be inclined to say "math is hard" and give up, which might correlate with people who say "computers are hard" and give up. Or in other words, it's easier to say "Prerequisite: Calculus 2" than it is to say "Prerequisite: be sufficiently determined to complete something many people find hard and give up on, or be one of the people who found it easy to begin with". And lo and behold, rather than getting people taking an advanced CS class and giving up, you instead get people not taking the class in the first place because they don't meet the prerequisites, which makes numbers look a lot better.
This is not the best solution for the problem. It's the solution most CS programs take, though.
(Necessary disclaimer because internet discourse: this is a comment on CS education in general, not a comment on Lambda School in any aspect.)
I think the issue is that many programs expect students to understand 'the basics' of calculus as an academic mathematician understands them, which I would consider to be more suitable as an upper level elective for a CS program.
A fun exercise would be to have graduating CS students take the same calculus exams that were required for admission to the program. I would expect that 10% would score much higher and the other 90% would score much lower.
I worked with students in a “intro calculus for humanities” type class for many years (as a sort of undergrad tutoring role, so, it was a while ago, I’m old now). Despite this experience it is pretty shocking to me that there are, like, actually adult people walking around who can’t at least do a derivative.
Spending too long in STEM academics absolutely warps your view of the mathematical skill floor I think.
