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Comment by mechanical_fish | Hacker News Reader

So, I agree with you at some level -- people who think they want to major in CS should be hit with the real thing ASAP, just as aspiring chemists get hit with Organic Chem and aspiring physicists get hit with the wave equation.

But:

Where is the fun and easy intro to BioChem course so that we can entice more people to become doctors?

Nobody dies when a literature major builds a PHP website in their spare time, or hacks together an iPhone app.

Moreover, there are fun and easy intro medical courses: They're called first aid courses, and everyone should probably take one.

Lots of majors have an intro class that emphasizes fun and higher-level perspective at the expense of the details. They often have demeaning nicknames ("Rocks for Jocks", "Physics for Poets"), which is unfortunate, because I'd far rather see people have one superficial course in a subject than know nothing about it at all.

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"I'd far rather see people have one superficial course in a subject than know nothing about it at all."

This is called high school.

High schools can be arbitrarily bad, and so it's customary for most colleges to have remedial courses, like Physics for Poets, for those students coming from high schools that didn't provide that.

Why should such a student be admitted to college?

It's not a student's fault if their high school is arbitrarily bad. You can sometimes tell that a student is smart and their high school sucked. Such students tend to get even smarter than you thought they were once they get to college.

There were not nearly enough teachers in my high school to even teach all the intro level courses I could have taken in college.

Your high school had a linguistics department? A geologist on staff? An economics teacher? A statistics teacher? A biochemist? An anthropologist? A sociologist? A sign language instructor? An oenologist? [1]

My high school didn't even teach calculus at the time. [2] And I was lucky that they had even had, e.g., a physics teacher who could actually teach physics. [3] Many do not. I know this because if you mention physics to a random college student they will generally tell you stories about their clueless high school physics teacher and how that teacher made them hate physics forever. ;)

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[1] "Oenology for Poets", though it did not go by that name -- it was colloquially called "the Wines course" -- was the runaway favorite of all the intro courses at Cornell:

http://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/facultybios/facu...

Needless to say, my US high school did not offer lectures on wines. I wonder if the situation is different in France or Germany. ;)

[2] Not that it mattered; My math teacher helped me convince the school to let me take math at the local university instead.

[3] Not that it mattered; My physics teacher was clueful enough to take me aside on day one, give me a copy of PSSC Physics and tell me that when I got bored I should read this book. I was a very lucky high school student to have such clueful teachers.

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