Computer Science FAIL – Higher Education in India
Update (March 13): He’s back, but now he’s simply shying away from what he doesn’t know.
Update: The professor in question has been reported and is now banned from taking any more classes.
This piece might come across as one intended to bad mouth my own college, but I have a sneaking suspicion that things aren’t all rosy in other parts of the country either.
I suppose every geek has had this same feeling before. You take a seat in the front row of your first Introduction to Programming lecture, all worked up about the fact that here, finally, is a class you can be on top of. The professor walks in, gives a little introduction, and you realize it’s going to be a long, long semester.
Today I decided to make a list of all the atrocities committed by my Introduction to Programming professor. I wasn’t expecting much because, even though he sounded like a complete knucklehead to the geek inside me, I was sure he at least knew the textbook inside-out. I was, as one would expect, wrong. So, hackers, get ready to cringe. Here’s my list.
- … Linux is basically a DOS based OS.
- These days we are using 128 and 256 bit processors.
- A compiler is a software that converts code written in a particular programming language to machine code. To compile a program, you must hit ALT+F9. (It took me a while to realize he was talking about the Borland Turbo C++ IDE from 1992, a prehistoric compiler Indian colleges use for all C and C++ courses.)
- The object code generated by a C++ compiler is almost identical to that produced by a Java compiler.
- The first high level language was Ada, also known as Smalltalk. (This was a big WTF moment.)
- The second high level language was COBOL, which was an improvement over Ada. (Cringe, cringe, cringe.)
- FOTRAN came after COBOL. (No, “FOTRAN” is not a typo. This is what he said.)
- FOTRAN, COBOL, Ada and Smalltalk were not general purpose languages.
- This one is classic: C was the first language to run on UNIX systems. All languages before C ran only on Windows.
I still haven’t completely recovered from the shock.
195 Responses to “Computer Science FAIL – Higher Education in India”
Uncool! lol, man that sucks.
“All languages before C ran only on Windows.”
Wow. Just wow.
Wow. Just wow. My cringe reflex is exausted and my facial muscles hurt from that last one.
Hahahahahahahahahahahaahahahahahahahahahaha….
He may have been right about the C being the first language to run on a UNIX system, but that is obviously not what that sentence meant.
It’s going to suck when you get answers right on the test and he marks them wrong… And then you’ll have to argue with him and that doesn’t sound that fun either.
Good luck!
lol
> It’s going to suck when you get answers right on the test and he marks them wrong… And then you’ll have to argue with him and that doesn’t sound that fun either.
If you actually wanted to give the answers that he would consider correct in the exam, how would you study for it? Eat lots of hallucinogenic drugs or something?
i would not be in india unless on vacation
Project: Try to get the old indian guy to admit that he is incorrect, and that he does not know what he is talking about. I do this sometimes to our “TCN” consultants for giggles, its a great way to start a meeting.
That explains a lot… sadly
A good solution to this that may keep you out of the firing line is to set up an account on gmail and send him a email refuting all of these with links to wikipedia or something. So for:
> C was the first language to run on UNIX systems. All languages before C ran only on Windows.
Give a link like this which states that the C programming lanugage was developed in 1972 :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_programming_language
while Microsoft was founded in 1975:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft
and Windows 1.0 was shipped in 1985:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_windows
Good luck!
For the love of your fellow students, please, please, please, keep this list and file an academic complaint (along with your corrections). Dates and times are good, too, as they give you credibility. Instructors like this hurt students.
Just one word: Urgh!
Sorry to hear that; at least you could talk to your school director about such an incompetent teacher (if he can be called teacher), and ask if you could take his place (and his wage
.
So this is why windows is pretty crap, people like him made it!
My eyes have turned into hostile entities. They torment my soul.
wow, you should really file a complaint about that sort of ignorance to your CS department.
Sounds like a bunch of koans.
Stephan
–
Programming is hard – http://blog.codemonkeyism.com
http://twitter.com/codemonkeyism
Oh wow, so i’m not the only one who has an ignorant bastard of a computing teacher (i’m in the UK)
Atrocaties by my teacher:
- Macs still run motorola chips
- 1024 x 789 is a resolution
- 1280 x 1024 is 4:3
- There is no such thing as raster
- No-one uses Linux anymore
- python is a waste of time
- pascal is awesome
Not as bad as you have it, admittedly.
As a Computer Science professor this made me cringe. I can’t imagine you’ll have much luck complaining to the administration since they are the ones that hired him.
Which school do you attend?
One of my CS professors – teaching an intro to relational databases course – admitted that she had no idea how to use ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE on her home machine. She had some notion that it might have to update… um, something… and it frequently popped up some types of warnings… but it was all just a big mystery to her.
I had trouble taking her class seriously after that.
- David Stein
There’s an easy solution to this particular problem, which does not even require you to complain to potentially equally ignorant higher-ups: Call the bastard on every single one of his errors; Ignore all attempts at proof by hand-waving or appeals to authority and humiliate him. Every. Single. Time.
He’ll be leaving to greener pastures voluntarily soon enough. And good riddance.
Man I realy feel sad about your classmates.
I live in Turkey and had a teacher like this (wasnt that bad but still). I know how does it feels to waste time on theese courses.
As I see professors on my departmet are dinasours who are still dreaming about their punch cards.
Lucky for me our younger teachers are pretty good.
That is rough. I think one of my worst was the professor that came in the first day, and managed to hook her laptop up to itself and couldn’t figure out why the projector wouldn’t work. I corrected her, and switched to a different professor for that course. Good luck.
Joke Topic.
I had a teacher fail my answer that SMTP is used both to send and receive email. To receive email, you use POP3.
My professor at NYU made Ada.
You’ll have to argue alot on exams. I had such teacher, exams weren’t a peace of cake
Conspirama - January 20th, 2009
Computer Science FAIL – Higher Education in India at Uncool…
As a Computer Science professor this made me cringe. I can’t imagine you’ll have much luck complaining to the administration since they are the ones that hired him. Which school do you attend? frankly. 20 Jan 09 at 3:20 am ……
Luis, sorry, your teacher is correct. SMTP is the protocol which is used to both send and receive e-mail. Machine A sends an e-mail via the SMTP protocol which gets received by machine B. A user on machine B can read the e-mail locally or… that same person can transfer the e-mail from that machine to another machine (pull it) via a protocol like POP or IMAP.
Maggie’s Blog » Blog Archive » Lis 753 - January 20th, 2009
[...] Computer Science FAIL – Higher Education in India at Uncool [...]
What do you mean “were general purpose”? Smalltalk is alive! Sure, it’s the reserved friend that sits in the corner and does all the cool stuff when nobody is looking, but it’s alive
Computer Science FAIL - Higher Education in India at Uncool « provaaa - January 20th, 2009
[...] See original here: Computer Science FAIL – Higher Education in India at Uncool [...]
That’s not higher education fail in India. Either you are making these up or your college/professor were unimaginably incompetent because even undergraduate students in India who take private tuitions of high school kids know more than this. Who are you fooling buddy.
hi there,
I passed out from Bangalore University long long time ago. Even then, my professor who taught FORTRAN didn’t say anything as stupid — of course, the class was NOT on programming languages BUT still… this has got to be very bad. All he had to do was look at Wikipedia on programming language history.
I’m sure this must have been a very very WT… moment for you!
I sure hope that some of us, who do Soft. Engg can give something back to our University/colleges — even on a part-time basis.
BR,
~A
>>
#
There’s an easy solution to this particular problem, which does not even require you to complain to potentially equally ignorant higher-ups: Call the bastard on every single one of his errors; Ignore all attempts at proof by hand-waving or appeals to authority and humiliate him. Every. Single. Time.
He’ll be leaving to greener pastures voluntarily soon enough. And good riddance.
>>
I’ve learned the hard way that is not the right way to go about it, it just makes passing a test much harder.
All my college professors were like this, save for one or two….. I never went for classes
…passed the exams on my own, but not with good scores as I did not know what *they thought were correct answers*
Video, or it didn’t happen.
Which part of India is your school?
I don’t believe he said those things. I believe you merely have poor comprehensive skills and/or an axe to grind.
In short, you are either a liar or an idiot. I’d like to hear the professor’s position on you.
Cheers.
Hey Mate…
I am sure you were in one of those screwd!! up colleges… where in you need to pay a donation to get a seat… :p
India is not just that buddy.. see the other side of colleges such as IITs and NITs… Bro.. Grow up!!
Blame the college, not India as a whole!!
Cheers,
Pavan
It’s kind of true that we’re using 128-bit processors… the execution units on Core are 128 bits wide, and when AVX ships, they’ll be 256 bits wide.
Luis,
SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) does send and receive email. When you open an SMTP connection to send email, what software is on the other side listening on the SMTP port to receive the email that you are sending? Yep, that would be SMTP, Luis.
POP (Post Office Protocol) is used to retrieve mail for a user from a mail database and is only one of a variety of retrieval / synchronization protocols, but SMTP is what does the actual heavy lifting and moving of email between servers.
As a fellow Indian Student, Oh fsck yeah.. I can empathize.
You will be deep in shit if you try to prove that your professors are wrong though. Most colleges have an ‘internal’ marks assessment system.
2 on 20 or 3 on 20 is the most you get if you try to prove them incorrect.
Sorry to hear about this mess you are in, though I must point out that your post did sound like a generalization. I must strongly disagree with you if that was your intended sense.
The quality of computer science education in India varies on a rather broad scale with really brilliant educators (IISc, IIT’s, IIIT, most NIT’s, most older core technical universities, TIFR) going through DOS, Borland TC era folks with the whole Rube Goldberg “computer training institute” industry.
Percentage wise there are more people receiving education in the lower end of the quality spectrum, but the upper end tends though numerically smaller tends to make a out of proportion positive impact on India’s image in the computer world. Smart well educated grads from these top colleges are always in very high demand, their professors are well known names in the industry and their college courses are at par or better and certainly much more competitive than most courses in colleges in other countries.
now you have systems which has more than 16mhz and 5 mb of memory..
(trust me.. he is soo welll respected in industry)
Who is this idiot professor and did you walk up and smack him?
Talk to the head of the department. Get this guy sacked! He’s not qualified to teach.
Just curious, which college do you attend? (I am also an Indian and had bad, though not this bad faculty).
ROFLMAO
This is soo wrong but mentioning soo many details on programming languages that I can’t help but getting suspicious about this teacher. Are you absolutely sure he was not playing a practical joke on you? “Here I am, telling all this junk, and nobody speaks up?”
I also did my post-graduation in India, which part of India did you study? Plus what university did you study, true there are many university in India but if you look at the good univ’s you can see to that these blunders dont happen. At worst you will find Math professors believe they are computer scientist…
I guess the most sane way of dealing with this is to confront him privately, to say that you know he’s full of shit, and say that since you do know this, you could make his life a living hell, at least during the classes.
Not doing this publicly is the key, as he would lose face and you’d be in deep shit.
Still risky though.
Ever thought of rectifying this horror? Ever thought of taking up teaching instead?
There are just too many people sitting in cozy jobs – but unwilling to take up teaching.
Omg! I didn’t knew half of these things!
No srly, I think there’s one professor like him in every college. At least we have one in our school.. You’ll just have to see those courses as Virtual courses and study those things by your self..
Good luck with the rest of your studies!
Yeah, India is just a bunch of degree mills. I worked with many Indians, who hold Masters and PhDs in computer science but don’t know the basics.
The US and European companies should stop hiring from countries like India. Cheap code laborers are no substitute for intelligent programmers.
Exactly why I dropped out of university (in the UK). I made the horrible mistake of taking a course in a subject I’d spent two years working in, electronics. Needless to say I knew the ‘right’ way to do things, not the ‘academic’ way. So tutorials were fun to say the least.
Any idea what the average pay of an Indian professor is?
That’s not true that *all* Indian programmers suck, or that companies should stop hiring. Its the companies that need to start hiring *intelligently*
Blind placement drives, with dumb interview questions, won’t get any company in any part of the world, good programmers. They need to See, not look
I sympathize with you dude..
I’ve seen similar lecturers too, tho, I’ve to admit they weren’t this bad..
but it was after listening to them that I understood the importance of 60% attendance limit and of having good friends (you know, for proxies
).. I’d just say that I made use of both 
That article was really interesting, is India going to pursue Computer studies?
i’ll say ur sistuation kinda reminds me of my CS lectures.am a student in kenya and the only way to pass is to cram.i was once failed for using streams in java coz the lecturer had only taught the JOptionPane dialog an didnt know anything about exceptions.feel you man!!! this geezers shouild GO!!
I went through the same shit man…
Check this one out. “A thread is a communication channel between the OS and the application”. I got that from the professor who taught OS.
élite offshore — intraordinaire - January 20th, 2009
[...] Délocalisez en Inde, qu’ils disaient. Michel Valdrighi | 10:46 | | tags : développement [...]
Those who can, do.
Those who can’t, teach.
Those who can’t teach, become Indian Compsci Professors
Change colleges/Universities….ASAP!
Computer Science FAIL - Higher Education in India « Stormrising’s Blog - January 20th, 2009
[...] Computer Science FAIL – Higher Education in India Computer Science FAIL – Higher Education in India [...]
Those graduate people in India who dont get job anywhere because they are too lame,
become lecturer in private colleges where starting from the HOD of CS dept to every other teacher doesnt really know what they have studied and what physical/practical significance it had or dont even care to know.
Not to defend this instructor, but is there any possibility that he was some kind of theoretical CS expert/math dude that got roped into doing an intro course? Of course, it doesn’t excuse such malfeasance, but I’ve suffered through more than one intro course where the teacher’s head was somewhere in the stratosphere of their discipline, not down on earth with the Freshman sitting in that intro course.
I’ve had some similar things in the UK; “MIT helped Apple create Windows”, “The first processor was the 286″, “When your windows system crashes you see ‘General Protection Fault FG125A’ – that’s a hexidecimal number”… My first test in that class included “Represent 768 as an 8-bit binary number” v_v
Even the textbook wasn’t much better, claiming that “localhost” is a protocol and “.org” is specific to UK websites…
I haven’t been able to comment because I somehow managed to break Wordpress. I can still log into my dashboard, but when I visit this site I’m logged out.
Anyway, here are some rectifications -
1. All the other professors in my CompSci department are really great.
2. I cannot disclose the name of my college/university. I can only mention the fact that my college was established in 2007, hence we are short of teachers and have to deal with people like this.
3. The quality of education in my college is much much better than even some of the big-name colleges. I don’t compare my college to the IITs, but the teaching here is definitely better than, say, Delhi College of Engineering.
4. I can’t leave the college, and I can’t drop this class. In India, education is cheap ($6000 total for my course) so everyone can afford to go to college. That means too many people competing for very few seats. If I leave this college now, getting into another one would be very, *very* difficult.
5. Some of the greatest colleges in the country are under appreciated – the Indian Institute of Information Technology (New Delhi), Amity University (Uttar Pradesh) etc.
6. My college teachers get about Rs.60000 p.m. That’s about US$1250. It might not sound like much, but that’s the average starting salary of a CompSci graduate.
7. Did I mention my teacher is *very* young? I think he might 26 or 27 at the most. He claims he’s been teaching for 5 years, which means he started as a prof. at the age of 22. That means he doesn’t have a master’s and he’s never had another job.
8. I’m perfectly happy with my college. I just despise this one guy.
Computer Science FAIL - Higher Education in India at Uncool - January 20th, 2009
[...] Continued here: Computer Science FAIL – Higher Education in… [...]
Hi,
I think this example is exaggerated, but it’s true that the computer science in schools and University should be better.
greetings.
Ну что, это просто пиздец! ;D
Украина прекращает транзит российских сообщений на зарубежный сайт. Так пусть начнется хохлосрач!
And there will be hatred » Blog Archive » AAAAA - January 20th, 2009
[...] Computer Science FAIL – Higher Education in India. [...]
Higher education in India is extremely poor…
256 bit! Oh my, and the guys do not know…
After that….
I don’t doubt any more quality of education in Russia
Superpower India | Nine Mohs - January 20th, 2009
[...] This isn’t really it. It’s not just the professors who are inept with basic computer science concepts. [...]
Пиздец
You can try getting your CS lab to run http://www.codecutter.net/tools/quincy/ as C compiler. It offers single file compilation just like the Borland compiler without requiring the user to create projects. It is open source and based on Mingw. We did this in our college. Don’t let your peers get lost because of incompetence of your teacher.
> My college teachers get about Rs.60000 p.m. That’s about US$1250. It might not sound like much
Wow. It is not so bad, imo. Are you sure? It is something close to $500 in some Europe countries.
COOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL 8P
That certainly looks nice. I have also been trying to help people set up Geany and MinGW on their computers. So far I’ve only managed to converts 2 or 3 people, and they’re the kind of guys who would probably have figured it out all by themselves.
Are you sure this isn’t some sort of recovery program for computer addicts ?
To the guys giving Luis grief about supposedly getting SMTP vs POP3 wrong, learn to read: he said SMTP does both, his prof said one does send and the other does receive.
So, Hans in particular, how does your patronising tone sound to you now, huh?
Oh, I know how it’s terriful to know that teacher is more stupid than you. But this is outstanding bullshit.
I guess all the learned people in this list, can now start contributing to their own college and schools. I think its ok to point at his professor; but that is merely not enough.
I guess the education can be improved only when the industry gives back TIME to it. so the question is “How much time will you give to your/any school/college to teach what you have learned so far?” Its time to give back.
Это просто пиздец.
Mega-ultra-uber-noober-nitro-giga-turbo-tuberculo-FAIL!
#define FAIL whatThisGuyJustDid – 1
А потом ещё кто-то удивляется откуда индусокод берется.
Computer Science FAIL - Higher Education in India at Uncool | Computer Internet and Technology Articles. - January 21st, 2009
[...] Read the original here: Computer Science FAIL – Higher Education in India at Uncool [...]
I believe it was a comedy class
Website Directory - Computer - January 21st, 2009
[...] Computer Science FAIL – Higher Education in India at Uncool [...]
You idiot, if you wish make-up and publish some jokes on your college, merely to get public attention, or even if it were true, why do you say Higher Education in India and spoil India’s reputation. After all education in India is not as bad as you say. May be its your college in particular.
Rename the title to education in your “college” or perhaps knowledge of your “CS professor”.
Now that you appear to screen every comment, let me tell you – people abroad form opinion based on blogs so don’t give a bad picture of India in general when the problem is limited to your college and a particular professor. Keep the country’s name far away from your post. Thats my humble request.
@Uncool:
==> I cannot disclose the name of my college/university. I can only mention the fact that my college was established in 2007, hence we are short of teachers and have to deal with people like this.
I don’t see any harm in telling your college’s name.
==> The quality of education in my college is much much better than even some of the big-name colleges. I don’t compare my college to the IITs, but the teaching here is definitely better than, say, Delhi College of Engineering.
Really! I am now very interested to know your college’s name. Seems like a good upcoming college.
==> I can’t leave the college, and I can’t drop this class. In India, education is cheap ($6000 total for my course) so everyone can afford to go to college. That means too many people competing for very few seats. If I leave this college now, getting into another one would be very, *very* difficult.
Don’t quit your college. Unless you go to IIT or something like that, you are always going to find an odd bozo in the professor’s hat.
And btw, $6000 is cheap but not by indian standards.
==> Some of the greatest colleges in the country are under appreciated – the Indian Institute of Information Technology (New Delhi), Amity University (Uttar Pradesh) etc.
Don’t know about Amity but IIIT (all of them) is definitely very highly regarded. And I’m surpised to find that there’s an IIIT in Delhi. I know of Allahabad and Hyderabad
==> My college teachers get about Rs.60000 p.m. That’s about US$1250. It might not sound like much, but that’s the average starting salary of a CompSci graduate.
If by graduate you mean BTech/BE, then you are mistaken. The *average* salary of a computer grad fresher is definitely much lower than Rs 60000 pm. Some people do get it but the average is much lower.
==> Did I mention my teacher is *very* young? I think he might 26 or 27 at the most. He claims he’s been teaching for 5 years, which means he started as a prof. at the age of 22. That means he doesn’t have a master’s and he’s never had another job.
It is possible to get a Masters at 22 or maybe he is just a little older than you think. I dont think, people with only a bachelors degree are allowed to teach anyway.
пиздец, слов нет
hmmm.
===> I don’t see any harm in telling your college’s name.
Believe me, I do
===> Really! I am now very interested to know your college’s name. Seems like a good upcoming college.
You bet. My college will probably never be as popular as DCE, but the quality of education will definitely go up in future.
===> Don’t know about Amity but IIIT (all of them) is definitely very highly regarded. And I’m surpised to find that there’s an IIIT in Delhi. I know of Allahabad and Hyderabad.
This is the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, very different from the IIITs elsewhere. IIIT was established just last year. The best part about this college is that they don’t have any kind of bullshit in their cirriculum. In the first semester, the IIIT students are studying Discrete Maths, which is the most important course for a CS undergrad. We’re still stuck with calculus, which has little practical application at the undergrad level.
I mentioned Amity because most people badmouth it. In fact, Amity University is the closest you come to a *real* university. Here’s food for thought – if you have a great business idea, Amity will give you venture capital and help you with marketing and paperwork so you can concentrate on building your product. How many universities do that?
===> It is possible to get a Masters at 22 or maybe he is just a little older than you think. I dont think, people with only a bachelors degree are allowed to teach anyway.
There was one other teacher we had last semester who had only a bachelor’s degree. I told you, we’re short of teachers. Things are definitely improving, with new teachers coming in, but until then we’ll have to do with this guy.
I took a CIS course for a cheap A when I was a freshman computer science major, and the CIS professor made equally stupid remarks which included:
-SQL is not a language, but rather a product designation. (She seriously said that SQL is, itself, literally not a language or even a language spec!)
-The pentium III is a 64bit CPU (news to anyone that had more than 4GB of RAM on such a system)
-”Servers” are bigger than mainframes.
-Object oriented programming is the same thing as GUI programming.
-Microsoft invented object oriented programming.
Do you happen to be a college student? If yes, then your college must be extraordinarily good because I know people who attend some of the bigger colleges like DCE and NSIT, and the situation isn’t any better back there either. In fact, CS education around the entire world is pretty sucky. If you cared to read through some of the comments here, you’d see people from Russia, Romania, Europe and the USA posting their own WTFs.
You spoke my heart out.
You can’t say it sucks in “India”, “Russia” at least you didn’t say Poland
.
You can only say it sucks in some colleges.
Nu da, bezdets
Lolz….
profs sucks…really i thing it happens with all computer eng.. students…
I think doing computer engg. is my biggest mistake of my life….
all what i know till now is solely because of me..
Hmmmmmmm
You can’t say that.
It’s still your Professors who suck.
Why are you all here like that!
You talk in general.
You should say:
My Professors suck!!!
………………………………….
Am I wrong?
You are studying in either:
(1) IP University
(2) MDU University
I am also in a college in one of these universities, and can understand you. (I think you are studying in an MDU college (GCE?))
However the higher education system does not suck all over India. BITS Pilani in particular is known for high quality.
But yeah for all over India, since there is over excess demand for Engineers, and too much demand for Engineering Courses, getting in a decent college is extremely difficult and frankly these compromising colleges just don’t cut it out. Imcompetent Staff, System, Out dated course, What not? I’m speaking from experience.
So Please remove “India” from here. Frankly.
>>The US and European companies should stop hiring ??>>from countries like India. Cheap code laborers are ?>>no substitute for intelligent programmers.
You have met wrong guys I guess.
LMAO!!! I’m laughing so hard I can barely sit up and tears are pouring down my face.
If you’re there to get an education, change classes yesturday before you make this website.
Uncool – awesome post. Good luck in your studies. Idiots come from everywhere and I commend you on not disclosing the name of the school. Your positive attitude will pay off in the long run.
Your college is NOT alone. Turbo C is a plague in India. Visual C++ is free (and has THE best debugger in the world). wxDev-C++ is also free (MinGW/gdb-based, IDE, with the wxWidgets framework). Out of the hundreds of free compiler suites out there, India uses Turbo C. You wouldn’t happen to have any textbooks by Yashwant Kanetkar? If you do, please (literally) burn those books and then go out and get Koenig & Moo or something relevant (even the _free_ “Thinking in C++” e-book by Bruce Eckel is a zillion times better than any of Yashwant’s books). Yashwant is the single worst thing to happen to Indian CS programs.
The sad thing is that your professor is perpetrating this knowledge upon students who DO NOT have your understanding who will then becomes professors and do the same thing again and again and again. Simply look around the room at those who are studiously taking notes like good little students. Then approach them later and tell them the truth (assuming that is acceptable behavior – I’m only somewhat familiar with the whole “saving face” concept Indians and Asians have embedded into their societies and maybe this falls outside that realm).
Wow… I’m taking a grade 12 computer science (it’s gonna be java based) starting in 4 days, and this made even ME cringe. I obviously don’t have the knowledge you do, but I’m slowly going in that direction.
if you can’t get staff to listen to your complaints go over their heads to the student’s union.
(in the UK all Farther Education and Higher Education establishments must have 2 student goveners, i assume it is similar in India)
hahahaha…funny!
i just vomited.
WW WW TTTTTTT FFFFFFF ??? !!! ??? !!!
WW WW TTT FF ?? ?? !!! ?? ?? !!!
WW W WW TTT FFFF ?? !!! ?? !!!
WW WWW WW TTT FF ?? ??
WW WW TTT FF ?? !!! ?? !!!
NOOOOO it killed my ascii art wtf
I did start going about the process of complaining about one, and he retroactively reverted the problem the next lecture. I think someone mentioned something in his ear.
When he sets coursework that asks “Why does SMTP require MIME and HTTP doesn’t?” I literally told him to go read the HTTP 1.1 specs. But I think it was the whisper in the ear that wised him up a bit. Mostly though my Lecturers at least have some clue, even if slightly outdated in some areas.
maan, u shud drop…
That’s not even funny. You seriously have to contact the people who hired the lecturer and urge them to introduce tougher requirements and reassess all their staff.
If he’s teaching that crap to people, then we can only imagine what the next generation of teachers will be like *rolls eyes*
So I guess they’ll be sending those jobs back soon…
10 print fail
20 goto 10
Perhaps you should get the “Computer Programming for Dummies” from your local bookstore and give it to your lecturer.
Point 1 was enough, I didn’t need to read further after that. Its almost as if the lecturer was thumb sucking.
I’ve been programming for over 10 years, and I can quite honestly say that there were no “windows” when I was actually studying. There was windows 3, but our college could never afford to load all their computers with it.
We had only DOS and UNIX/Linux shell.
We had no GUI either, the only windows we knew back then were draw boxes, this is funny sh!t. I suggest you get a refund on your course.
This is a serious matter though, not only is the course outdated, but its completely wrong as well.
and yet, they are the one who take away american high tech jobs.
who is the sucker now ???
I agree with the person in #101 & #102. Were there less name-spoilers in India that you felt the need to join their team?
Let me tell you something, my Indian *high school* CS teachers were a thousand times better than your university professor. In my city, a 14yr old school-going kid knows much more than the professor in question. If computer science education is so good @ Indian schools, how can it become so horribly crap @ university level?
You’ve either made it all up (to attract visitors to your site) or you’re studying at a really cheap college where they hire jobless, 3rd class graduates as college professors. Or, in a completely different situation, your professor paid lots of money to a clown working at the university department in order to get a job.
oh wow… my faith in humanity has been lost!
Sorry to hear about that. It sounds like my high school Java teacher who doubled as the school’s network admin. (this ensured some impromptu, unannounced lessons in network security)
Ha. I’m not even a Computer Science major but my university requires you to take several CS courses. My basic understanding of programming is better than this guy’s and he’s being paid to teach this shit.
u kiddin i took computer science in my 12th grade(i am an indian) and boy i felt so fucked when i realised that i still had to use 1992’s boroland c++. its 2008 man! the only probelmes now u can’t look for help as the compiler is outdated and if u do learn the new standard and use it u end up loosing marks in ur exams
I’ve seen the code below to a whiteboard in my university:
void addNumbers(int n, int k)
{
int r = n + k;
return r, n, k;
}
And I still didn’t realize who wrote that!
hey guys and gals (specialy my fellow indians) wht r we doing here.jst hitting out at ourselves?who the profs?i guess in nxt 5,10,20 yrs we all r gona be some of the profs.so instead of complaining abt ourselevs raise the stndrds and thn speak.just think of 1 fact we gone throgh such tormentures still we do giv in IT sector so much….so just cut the crap and never expose such shit..we all know we all go through this..but instead complaining we should act…wht do u sat everyone?
At least he didn’t say the B-Language was used before the C-Language.
Or that C++ is incremental!!
Maybe the professor was the gym teacher – a substitute.
Hey man ? please save yourself and your batchmates from this atrocity and give us that guys e-mail or phone number or anything.
Why didn’t you burn him? You just tell the dickhead:
1) Can you explain DOS based? (prof. answers something dumb) So basically, you don’t know. Please retract yourself as you’ve mislead everyone.
2) Why refer to ALT-F9, which is a program specific option, when you’re trying to explain a concept? (prof. answers that ALT-F9 is used in many programs, to save his ass) Are you saying that the majority of compilers in the world use ALT-F9 to compile?
After you do that a couple times, the guy won’t say dumb shit anymore and you’ll be able to write anything on exams
Ive been a software engineer for a little over a decade.
Up until 9 months ago I worked in the US defense industry exclusively so I had little exposure to foreign developers. I used to complain about a
lack of finesse and knowledge on the part of american
developers I encountered(requiring a TS clearance precludes foreign developers in that sector for the
most part). Now that I have spent the last 9 months
cleaning up some of the most atrocious code, written primarily by indian developers, i have ever
seen for 2 different commercial companies I have to say that this is not a shocking revelation to me in the slightest. To the indian engineer that posted above I will say that I do not want to make blanket statements but I am certainly justified in giving my observations on the situation. Only 10-20 percent of the indian engineers that i have met would i consider competent. Likable? yes. Professional? Certainly.
India having entered so aggressively into this industry in the US has a stake in policing its universities and colleges. Pumping out sub par engineers so that they can return their earnings into the indian economy is short sighted. In the long run the backlash will be drastic.
It relieves me that we’re not the (otherwise often touted as) stupidest nation.
print out copies of this webpage, complete with comments and start sticking them on the notice boards in your college. that should get his attention, might even make him get off his ass and do a little research
dude wait C wasnt first?
OK talk about a WTF moment you have just totally blown everything I know to be true. next you will tel me that that the wank worm was a hoax and ALF isnt real. dang man thanks for nothing, holy crap the internet sucks and really i am gonna go back to my pron.
YES YES MY PRETTY POINT CLICK PRON!
io shall avenge you.
WoW! I’ve met a couple like that too. You might try a technical college. Oregon Institute of Tech at least has half the staff qualified…..Well actually half might be pushing it. We’ll leave it at a quarter.
This is why I never outsource.
The problem is not about the country/teacher/book/IDE. The problem is the students themselves.
I’m from India and I’ve been working in the US for the past 4 years. Recently we were hiring and I was interviewing CS undergrads. I asked them to write code for finding the integer with the most number of occurrences in a given array of integers.
Half of them had absolutely no clue in spite of many hints. Most of the others were way off. One of them said something about building a finite state machine! Another guy was trying to use File IO.
I think these guys would have been just as hopeless even if they had a good teacher/good book/good IDE.
i only get the second one. i’m not a geek
WTF!!!
That gut is so stupid. If windows was first. Levers were the first OS. The first computers were mechanical. Secondly you could say the first OS was life. More importantly the computer is the brain. However C was ran on life at the beginning of the alphabet. So f***it. C ran on life 2000 years ago. 2000 years ago Bill Gates and the other guy he started Microsoft with (Yes they were in a partnership) had about 100 ancestors to go before they first booted up after appearing from the factory (womb). So, using biological science I have proven one guy who I shall probably never get to meet or cringe at … wrong.
After rereading some comments I need to make another post. !. Linux has a vast range of window managers to make it grapical, all based on X. Gnome, KDE (*shiver*) and xfce are all popular. “. 128bit and 256bit chips do not exist. I stilll count in i’s i386, 486, 684 and the intel i7. 3. WTF is FOTRAN. 4. Java isnt a programming language. 5.ADA = Smalltalk??? (ada is named after computational theorist who worked with the guy who made the difference engine i think. Ada Lovelace.) O.K thank you for reading.
Damn , your professor is dumb ass but i never expected u to be even a bigger fool than him to take admission in such a college .
Yeah dude. It’s like what a time man. Totally whack, yeah? I mean, how is it man? DUDE!
rolling on the floor laughing uncontrollably…
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still, rolling on the floor laughing uncontrollably…
yeah i had a teacher that told us that “Linux” was an object-oriented language
then he proceeded to say that Java was not..
I had an OS prof that insisted that random access memory was not random at all… and that you had to iterate through each byte in memory to get to the address you wanted. WTF?
This is really bad.
I am also one lecture but my experience is little bit different, it is difficult to teach 60 students at a time then their interest also important.
Second thing college management in every college (99% colleges have political connections anyhow).
Third is UGC ,NNAC committees who giving grades to colleges are not doing their work fairly.
Finally if you want to learn anything then don’t blame to anyone(because it is really difficult to change this system ), just take start and take interest and be consistent ..
As if the situation in college wasn’t bad enough my first instructor during my training days at one of India’s top IT companies had some serious pronunciation issues. On the very first day he must have repeated a word we had never heard of before – “a-skay-zee” about ten times confounding everyone in the audience. It was only later when he stepped up to the board and scribbled “ASCII” did we figure out what exactly was going on.
You might expect a high school programming teacher to make these mistakes, especially since (at least in Romania) some teachers who can’t get other classes make a crash course in programming and teach the programming class just so they won’t be out of a job… but even so, they don’t make these awful mistakes, they just read from a book all the time.
My programming class in college was just fine, too bad the rest of my classes are not
, I’m studying power engineering and we’re being pumped with so much theoretical information that we forget close to everything after we pass an exam, we’re being trained to be learning machines not engineers.
Mr. Uncool,
Ah, the eternal bane of a student.
I must say that even though your situation sucked big time, the only solace is that at the very least, you were in the know.
Think about the students who actually take it to heart!
Personally, computing and computer languages are such a fluid field with diverse opinions (for eg, some say Java is fully OOP oriented, some disagree!)
that beyond some basic facts, it merely is an open area for discussion!
And discussion, along with experimentation indeed must be encouraged!
It is a pity though that many people are so myopic in their perspectives that they forget that the history of computing is worthy of deep respect and sophisticated courses are indeed dedicated to it.
Yet in so many introductory computing courses around the world, imperative languages seem to be the sole definition of programming.
Ah, if only things moved beyond that…
Lisp, Prolog and ML anyone?
yer all a pack of nerds!
I’m just starting out in computer programming..
And I hope to God I never get a teacher like that! :O
~JPx
I haven’t looked at any of the comments, so I’m probably repeating some.
As I read this thing, I was struck by the common theme that people must see when attending institutions of (supposedly) higher education. I found myself wondering if my teacher was only looking for ideas from people like me for her own use to complete her own education. I must admit that I wrote some pretty nifty papers in my class on networking that I took at a Junior College right after I retired from the Navy.
I’m only a lowly tech that was educated by the US Navy, but I know that Ada is a failed language the the DOD tried to implement long after other high level languages.
Who cares how you spell FOTRAN? Does anybody still use it? COBOL? Believe it or not, there are still people using it.
I say let’s get rid of tenure. They don’t deserve it. The student is the one that winds up losing.
“Microsoft published Lindows after the day they bought Linux” our uni teacher said.
u still alive after this lecture??
i have some gr8 experience frm my teacher …
wat she said in lecture……
Router is software & it as big as building size ,and it can be downloaded……
awesome… too true.. to add to that… 640*480 graphics in turbo C is called computer graphics!!! 640*480 is high-definition.. are DirectX and OpenGL dead??
FORTRAN is still widely in use BTW – the US government has many legacy programs that function perfectly and were written in FORTRAN. Why port something if it works?
Ohhh yeah I know what he is talking about… The languages before C was Aye and Bee!
What an idiot.
I had my Engineering completed way back in 2001 in India.I am yet to see such a weak lecturer.
those idiots who sticks to windows and still searches internet for borland TC crap explains why they are on net.due to such lecturers.
OTOH ,Here in South India ,It is GNU/Linux and different IDE’s like eclipse which are used by most Engineering colleges.
This sort of ignorance is forced on because of the deep impact of microsoft and windows which has locked the brain for some people here to get sane.
So much facepalm, can’t focus.
Surprised he’s not saying windows vista was the first MS OS and is an awesome OS… seriously… how does that professor have a job???
>Ohhh yeah I know what he is talking about… The languages before C was Aye and Bee!
well, actually, B did come before C…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCPL
Normal in Poland too.
lmao. reminds me of my college days.
Dude! I Don’t trust you!!!
how come this moron even has a job???
Seriously consider changing the collage ASAP!!!
Someone reported this guy, so now he’s banned from taking classes. My bad, I should have updated the post to reflect this. Doing this right now.
“someone” eh?
Heh :p Believe me, I didn’t report him. It was some CompSci girls from second year. The dean *listens* to girls.
@Uncool & other current cs students in india:
+1 to the guy who said YKanetkar was the worst thing that happened to CS in India. Most regular profs go by him and e.balaguruswamy, and insist on turbo c on dos. but dont despair; not all are like that. we’ve had a tradition of lan fests to install linux way back when it came in floppies. not all of india is like this. and it looks like you guys are not unaware either, so good. CS has always been about self discovery anyway. we’ve always had a good tradition of bunking class – use your prerogative and stay away from the idiot profs.
@Others from outside india:
+1 to the guys pointing out that this is not the norm. it isnt. india isnt all code monkeys of the lesser kind. nor are its teachers. unfortunately, there’s no blog extolling the virtues.
@Rest who take this opportunity to do some india bashing:
yes we do have sucky opportunists amongst us who’ve invaded the CS scene because its the in thing. we hate them too. but trust me when i say there are true cs geeks from india too, who lust for the noosphere, and like the vi/emacs/ just the same as you guys. we see the beauty in code, understand the reason behind tabs vs spaces, and agonize over the latest paradigm shifts. we hate web 2.0 but like (and were aware before they got their buzznames) its tech underpinnings just the same. we know the value of elegant code.
in fact, thats the only good thing that this shitty economy might bring about – weeding of those posers from our scene so we can do what we like to do with the least possible SNR.
peace
Ankur,
I can understand the plight. My college too has such teachers, but none of them say so much shit.
Duffer Trainer Whats Else. India have a poorly structured education system.
Even I had faced many idiots (That was implemented by my most idiotic principle)
I recalled One event
When I asked one of my trainer
“What is multimedia I got Reply ..Lots of Media”
I realized my mistake and commit that I will never ask any question to that teacher again.
That Idiot even don’t know even a 5th passed student knows Multimedia means Lots of media.
I surprise How this kind of guys are selected in education system at Eng. College level.
Even after completing my education I had faced many Idiots (They are selected at Eng. College Trainers)
And Teaching Students linux/Unix/Core/Socket programming
And Don’t even know How to use TCP/IP to connect between PC.
Last But the most Remarkable event
A Guy Eng Passed out with 84% came to me and ask for job (Just before these rainy days).
I asked him Are you a programmer.
Replied Yes (With tons of confidence and Lots of Smiles Like Desi Customer care Girls)
Had you made websites/web application before
Replied Yes During my college Level (I know What the level exactly anyway Just to get on to the conclusion I asked)
Do you know What is web server
Reply was amazing I don’t know
That’s a proof what exactly Indian Eduction System producing
If Your GUY DON’T KNOW WHAT IS WEB SERVER THEN YOU ARE DUFFER NOT THE GUY BECAUSE ITS YOUR DUTY TO TRAIN HIM.
IF YOU CAN NOT UPDATE YOURSELF THEN FIND ANOTHER JOB.AND DON’T WASTE COUNTRIES MOST VALUABLE ASSET-YOUTH
–
Regards
Alok Tiwari
India
ouch!
This is all bluff… This idiot is making all this up…
No one can suck so badly in CS and be a CS “Professor”, which is the highest ranking position. And no one is so insane to hire such a guy for his college or university…
The OP is an idiot… stop reading his posts…
~Aditya
ouch, that was painful to read. to think you actually had to sit through that!!! some people should be hit upside the head for just popping off at the mouth in the guise of teaching if they don’t know what they are talking about…
Hah.. I got to an IIT – the Illinois Institute of Technology, in the US, and there’s one professor like that here.
The first couple classes you take here as an undergrad are pure programming, meant for those who don’t yet know any programming languages. All done in Java.
One example of what he did that comes to mind is, when I was TAing the class, he gave the students code that couldn’t compile, primarily because of missing “import” statements and semicolons.
When fixed, there was infinite recursion in the constructor.
..Yeah, no one likes this guy.
LOL!!!
Some what same experiences for me.
# This one is classic: C was the first language to run on UNIX systems. All languages before C ran only on Windows.
WTF!!!
Windows!!!
Give me a break.
Ankur is right. Most of the Indian professors does not hold the knowledge to teach comp science. In fact students know rather better than them. Luckily I got two excellent teachers of CS, and others are bullshit.
Some good ppl have told us to improve our education quality. Thanx to them.
But im giving u another idea. When class starts get outta there. Go to cantine or outside. Smoke or gossip. Come after he leaves. It’ll save your reasons, badly attacked by that stupid prof.
Its good to learn nothing than learn wrong.
In my Engg i had a faculty who said :
-> You can try Red Cat Linux
-> In Neural Networks we will be learning about mind in our brain.
When i heard that, me and the guy next to me burst out
laughing, for which prof said … you should be ashamed of laughing like this after coming to final year … GET OUT !
Aditya,
what you are pointing out is requirement. It should be the way you are telling, but sadly it isn’t the way you think.
There are thousand of engineering colleges all over the country. Do you still think that all colleges have good quality faculty.
In Indian Engineering colleges, promotion is based on seniority and no of years a teacher has taught and not on proficiency.
I think we should stop reading your comment. The OP opened his heart on this blog post. I can confirm many of such similar incidents which happened in my college too.
Indian Technical Education System needs an overhaul « Manish’s Tech Blog - June 7th, 2009
[...] Computer Science FAIL – Higher Education in India – Ankur Sethi [...]
I haven’t laughed that hard in a LONG while…
I’m lucky that I’m a networking major, so my interaction with most computer science individuals is more limited, but I HAVE had my run-ins with similar professors…
This really really hurt
Uncool man. Very uncool. He needs to be re-educated.
I can empathize with the author. Now I understand why every indian programmer I ever encountered was so incompetent ( dumb in plain language ). Java virtually became indian programming language. Now I am dealing with huge java application written by one of NIT graduates ( isn’t it one of the best Universities in India ?) and it’s a nightmare. Everything that can be f…d up is f…d up there. Everything that can be hardcoded is hardcoded. And it has sometimes like 12 levels of inheritance. They just cannot code, they cannot think. I’ve arrived at conclusion that they are simply incapable of thinking. But they know all right key words like “Hibernate”, “spring”, “Agile Development”, “Best Practices” etc. And most of the time they have no clue what is Big O notation, what’s the complexity of top stack element retrieval, what is hash function ( I heard that it’s a HashMap
) etc. They also great at backstabbing. Sometimes it makes me think it’s their national trait. If it was up to me I would never hired any indians for IT.
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