I went to Rensselaer as well, graduated 24 years ago. I am mostly shocked at the stuff it is obvious other schools are not interested in teaching these days in terms of core computer science curriculum.
Maybe the issues around high school math are part of it, but this was kind of obvious in the 1990s as well, I remember sharing a cube as an intern with a graduate student at another well known school and they were taking graduate classes in the summer and were using the same book for a supposed graduate class that I had for a class my freshman year at RPI.
I think RPI's core program requiring Data Structures & Analysis, Fundamentals of CS/Models of Computation, Programming Language Design, study of Grammars, etc.. is an outlier for undergraduate CS curriculum.
It seems rare I come across someone who can analyze the complexity of an algorithm, check if something can be parsed by a Regular Expression, really understands recursive algorithms, etc.. unless they went to graduate school, and the industry doesn't seem to expect people to understand this stuff.
But you can't necessarily generalize. Not all high schools are the same and they never were. And old professors at RPI are just mirroring the historical reputation of RPI as a tough school. In the past they probably just had more freedom to fail all those students out of the school.
Maybe the issues around high school math are part of it, but this was kind of obvious in the 1990s as well, I remember sharing a cube as an intern with a graduate student at another well known school and they were taking graduate classes in the summer and were using the same book for a supposed graduate class that I had for a class my freshman year at RPI.
I think RPI's core program requiring Data Structures & Analysis, Fundamentals of CS/Models of Computation, Programming Language Design, study of Grammars, etc.. is an outlier for undergraduate CS curriculum.
It seems rare I come across someone who can analyze the complexity of an algorithm, check if something can be parsed by a Regular Expression, really understands recursive algorithms, etc.. unless they went to graduate school, and the industry doesn't seem to expect people to understand this stuff.
But you can't necessarily generalize. Not all high schools are the same and they never were. And old professors at RPI are just mirroring the historical reputation of RPI as a tough school. In the past they probably just had more freedom to fail all those students out of the school.