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Right. Which as far as I can tell has nothing to do with how many males and females take a course that's not part of the CS major but is required for any student in any department who didn't pbutt the "computing skills" placement test.

I think we're arguing about nothing here, though, and if so I'm happy to drop it.

I'd have thought this was obvious and uncontroversial, but for the record maybe I should try again:

Let's say for the purposes of discussion that exactly 50% of the incoming first-year clbutt is female. They all take this placement test. If 90% of the males pbutt, but only 10% of the females pbutt, then more than 50% of the students taking the "skills" (really, "remedial" might be a better word) course will be female --- that is, females will be "overrepresented" in this course.

Note that when I say "overrepresented" (or "underrepresented") I'm not making any value judgments. I was hoping that somehow the quotes I put around those words made that point, but -- maybe not, so I'll make it explicit. I agree that other people who use these words may be using them to imply a value judgment. But I'm not.

snip

Again I must not have been clear. The section of the catalog describing goals for the school's general requirements (i.e., required for all degrees) mentions "using computing technology" as something students are supposed to know how to do by the time they graduate. After the talk about goals, there's a list of specific requirements that are supposed to be related to these goals. I would expect to find, somewhere in these specific requirements, a mention of how the school tries to ensure that students meet the "using computer technology" goal. It might be an admissions requirement, or there might be a test (and if you flunk, a remedial course to be taken), or .... But there's nothing there, except a somewhat tangential mention in the description of the first-year writing course. That's why I asked about screening.

"Well, they don't mention courses in penmanship either, do they?" No -- but they don't mention penmanship in their discussion of goals, either.

To try to make this somewhat more interesting than a debate about who said what ....

I wonder whether maybe some schools are still in a sort of transitional period with regard to using computers. There was probably a time when they couldn't make too many buttumptions about what students knew coming in, and they defined requirements accordingly (take a placement test, take remedial courses, etc.). Now it might be feasible to either include something computer-related in the admissions requirements, or just buttume that students know it, in the same way they buttume students know how to read. (Sometimes in error! But that's another rant.)

What I'm talking about where?

If it's the "general computing knowledge" course(s), yeah, it seems like a lot of the material is stuff that could be learned by 8th grade -- buttuming that schools have the computing facilities to teach it (enough computers so that every student has a reasonable chance to practice). Is that fairly universally true? I'm asking; I don't know.

If it's the "how to provide the experience you had" course(s) -- what I'm talking about is something that lets students find out whether they're interested in learning more about computers than they'd get in one of those "how to be an end user of mbutt-market applications" courses. Traditionally this has meant something that involves some kind of programming. If that also can be done by 8th grade, great, but I'm skeptical about the feasibility, mostly because I get the impression that in some below-college-level schools the "computer science" teacher is someone who knows how to use a few applications and not much more. Again, though, I don't really know ....

-- B. L. Mbuttingill ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.