ence curriculum, if you spend enough time coding you’ll get all you need to get from the courses”), seniors agreed with faculty significantly more than CS1 students agreed with faculty.

Less than half of the seniors reject-
ed item 66 (“If you know what you are
doing you can leave work to the last
minute and still get it done”), confirm-
ing a problem identified by Waite et
al. 16 and Leonardi et al. 8 that students
see procrastination not as a failing but
as something positive, a way to dem-
onstrate personal prowess, writing:
“The important point here is that
for the informants in this study, wait-
ing until the last minute to begin a
project was not a sign of laziness or dis-
interest in the subject matter. Rather,
beginning an assignment late makes
successfully completing the task more
difficult, and, thus, is a sign of their ex-
pertise and mastery of technical skill.
In the laboratories on days before large
projects were due, informants regu-
larly discussed the status of their proj-
ects with one another, comparing how
much they had completed. Similarly,
on days on which a large project was
due, student engineers typically asked
one another ‘When did you start?’ and
‘When did you finish?’ Higher status
was awarded to those who could wait
the longest and still complete the proj-
ect successfully.”
Senior attitudes on this matter
were hardly better than those of CS1
students and slightly worse than CS2
students; at least they weren’t much
worse.

CS is creative and valuable. Responses to the three items in this subcluster were strongly related. Unfortunately, agreement between seniors and faculty was not strong for any of them. Worse, for two items, 50 (“The work you do in computer science in the real world requires a lot of creativity”) and 60 (“Reasoning skills used to understand computer science material can be helpful to me in understanding things in everyday life”), seniors agreed less with faculty than did CS1 students. For item 58 (“Research in computer science often develops really important ideas”), agreement with faculty was somewhat stronger among seniors than among CS1 students but at 66% did not constitute a ringing endorsement.

only 68% of
seniors agreed
with faculty that
doing things right
is more important
than just getting
a solution, though
this response
represents
a significant
improvement
over the position
of cs1 students.

Related items: Concepts and understanding matter. As mentioned earlier, these items form a larger subcluster together with the subcluster just discussed. There was variation in the number of seniors endorsing the faculty consensus, pointing to the value of concepts and understanding. For two of the apparent bright spots, item 12 (“I am not satisfied until I understand why something works the way it does”) and item 64 (“If you can do something you don’t need to understand it”), agreement was good but hardly better among the seniors than among CS1 students. Only for item 46 (“If I get stuck on a computer science problem, there is no chance I’ll figure it out on my own”) was the greater agreement by seniors than by CS1 students statistically significant.

On the negative side, for two of the items in this group the seniors agreed less with faculty than did the CS1 students. For example, seniors were less likely to endorse item 44 (“When I solve a computer science problem, I explicitly think about which computer science ideas apply to the problem”) than were the CS1 students. Most seniors (88%) said faculty explicitly endorsed thinking about ideas, but they themselves didn’t endorse it. Why didn’t they?

Interviews reported by Leonardi et
al. 8 may shed light on this misalign-
ment, identifying a “norm” among
students that “expertise is measured
by task difficulty” among the students
aspiring to be engineers, writing:
“The norm suggests that engineers
should place value on overcoming
challenge and ‘beating the odds.’ The
work practices reflecting this norm
artificially and purposefully increased
the difficulty of a given task, such as
a homework assignment. Taken to-
gether, these practices introduced a
sense of ‘sport’ to engineering work by
providing handicaps that ultimately
decreased an informant’s chances of
success. Informants perceived that
completing a task with a handicap was
a mark of an ‘expert engineer.’ ”
Leonardi et al. also suggested that
one way students increase the difficulty
of assignments (so as to demonstrate
their skill to themselves and sometimes
to their peers) is to ignore concepts that
would actually help with the work.