Student perspectives on mathematics in computer science
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mathematical competence is an important attribute for computer scientists, and mathematical courses are a core component of computing curricula. However, aspects of the role of mathematics, such as the importance of mathematical maturity and the relevance of calculus, have been debated for several decades. In addition, this discussion has focused on faculty and professional viewpoints. Student perceptions are noticeably absent. This paper describes an interview study conducted at a North American university that explores the perspectives of students on the role and importance of mathematics as well as the relationship between mathematics and computer science. Like the faculty, students voiced a range of viewpoints, and they selected courses based on their evolving beliefs. We found evidence that these course selections - and hence, the flexibility of the curriculum - helped to reinforce previously held beliefs about mathematics. The interviews also provided insight on the importance of career inclination on attitude toward the program and the curriculum's role in identity formation.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it