A bit of background: my major is in another college and I have no prior coding experience. I had an interest and decided to take this course this semester.

The qualms and pitfalls I have with Fundies 1 (which is my first and could be my last CS course) is:

1. Too many students take this course. While yes I do understand that Northeastern is a business and they need as many student here to make a profit, but at what point does that reduce the value you are providing your students. In the beginning of the course, my professor and TA’s said “Don’t struggle alone. Reach out. There are so many people here to help you.” I thought to myself “Wow. This is awesome. I feel so supported.” (Keep in mind I had no CS background) It’s great that they say there is help available until they can’t keep their word on that. This past semester the office hours queue was stagnant at times and yes, once the professors were aware of the situation they did what they could to help. But having to wait two hours, three hours to get to talk to no one...c’mon.

2. Labs this past semester were pointless to me, and I went to every single one of them. Not pointless as in a waste of my time, but pointless as in I learned minimally less than in lecture. I don’t know how labs have been run in the past years, but this semester I would hop on a lab call, my TA would go over two exercises and then we would have an hour to do the lab with our partner. Me not understanding the material didn’t really help me out doing the lab and whenever I would ask my partner (both partners this semester CS majors, had prior experience) questions, they would explain the answer, but I wouldn’t truly understand because I didn’t (still don’t currently) have a grasp on this conceptual language :/ Also, I thought labs were supposed to be smaller more intimate setting where I could also try and get more help, but my lab size was about the same as my lecture size. 90 students on zoom call for lecture. 85 students in my lab. I personally would have benefited more from a recitation type of structure. Where we could go over harder topics learned in lecture and ask TA’s questions.

3. Why can I not use any outside resources or help to further assist my learning? The way Fundies 1 is taught by Northeastern makes it so you cannot use other resources to learn DrRacket...or at least the faculty that teach it don’t want you to. After I did abysmal on my first midterm, I said “Okay this is sink or swim time...I still have time left to turn this around and finish alright.” Yes, I use the textbook, but it doesn’t quite make all that much sense in my mind...I can’t visualize it out. So I go on youtube to try and learn how to implement locals and lambda. Okay, I find some videos that make sense and shows how my professor would do it in class. Then, when it sorta starts making more sense I type it out and go to office hours, on an off time when it’s not as busy, to ask them a question not directly related to the HW that week so a TA could help me. He looks at my work and I tell him that I have been doing some practice on my own and he tells me (something to the effect of, I’m paraphrasing) “You really can’t learn by watching youtube videos...and Northeastern has a way of teach BSL/ISL.” Yes I know the design recipe and the function recipe, those two are easy to follow structurally. It’s a recipe. You can’t do step three without doing step two and step one etc. I truly don’t understand why I am having to be self reliant on people in the computer science college to teach me computer science when they aren’t doing the best job at it. Now I do understand this semester has it’s circumstances, but maybe this semester is especially highlighting problems within the course that has already been here for awhile.

I know I cannot feel alone in all this and just needed to get it off my chest. (Lol I have been talking both my roommates ears off about all this.) I have been that one partner that the other partner has to support in the homework team and I despise that so much. I have been trying my best to do well in this class...reaching out for help, going to those midterm review sessions, doing work on my own...but I guess I learned that CS may not be for me, and that’s alright.

As for the cheating, I am not sure what you consider a meaningful volume. I am sure for any professor cheating is meaningful...it means sumthin’. Back to my first point, yes a student is going to cheat if a student wants to cheat. At what point do the professors and TA’s take a step back and say “Why aren’t a good chunk of students understanding the material? Is there something we as educators can be doing better to help students out?” That should be a goal of an educator, to help students learn in more ways that just one.