Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University

I find threads like these funny, people complain about not enough software engineering such as not knowing design patterns or the details of a java implementation. On the other hand a different group complain about the lack of of 'real' cs, which is mostly math. Two opposing views, but they think the argument is both in their favour. There is also a massive backlash against universities in the UK at the moment. I am seeing many 'apprentice' software developers, and…

> By pre-1990 standards about 20% of the students should have been failed. Interesting, I find that number quite low. The failure rates for most CS courses at my BSc/MSc university (VU Amsterdam) usually hovered around 50% in the post-00s era, especially for the hard-line courses such as computer networks, finite fields and data structures. We were allowed to do an unlimited number of retrials (6 months in between), but still over a third of the students would drop out…

I would agree about the quality of publications and the pin heads who evaluate us simply by the number. It's really very stupid. On the point of teaching however I am a bit more optimistic ... in Sweden at least. I am fairly impressed with most of my students. They are for the most part curious, hard working and smart. So far the elements that have tried to dumb everything down have failed. Although they do keep trying... In the…