In explaining its decision to remove the P/D/F option, the department has stated that providing for the hundreds of students who enroll in these courses has overly-taxed not just its budget, but also its human resources. In response, rather than directly limiting enrollment numbers, the department has removed the P/D/F option in an ostensible attempt to guarantee that students who enroll in the course are fully committed to it. The Board believes that an inevitable consequence of this decision will be declining enrollment in these course.
While we remain sympathetic to the department’s concerns, we believe the decision to remove the P/D/F option for COS 126 will adversely impact the student body. While secondary school computer science education is on the rise, it is still not as common or as other courses. Thus, many students entering Princeton have never taken a computer science course before. The nature of computer science is unique: it is not something that one can necessarily know one is adequately adept at until one has tried it. Students taking COS 126 need to have the P/D/F option available as a safety net should they struggle in the course. In the absence of the P/D/F option, students with limited computer science backgrounds will be discouraged from enrolling in the course. The board believes that discouraging people who have never been exposed to computer science — including many from more disadvantaged backgrounds — will serve only to hurt the department by denying it potential new majors. Many incoming students have no idea if computer science is suited to them, and they can only find out if they try.
Furthermore, knowledge of computer science is becoming an important new skill that is valuable in a range of professions — including the sciences, the arts and the humanities.
In some sense, one can draw similarities to economics at Princeton. The Department of Economics is very similar to the Department of Computer Science in the popularity of introductory courses as well as the need to retain extremely high-quality faculty while balancing a budget. The economics department, however, has opted not to remove the P/D/F option on introductory courses. Instead, it offers its introductory level classes presumably in the hopes of giving students who have never tried economics before a good sense of what it is like and, more importantly, the understanding of economics’ great importance to society and everyday life. While the introductory courses in computer science may be uniquely intensive, it is similar to economics in its recognized importance in wide array of fields. A student who takes COS 126 and decides not to become a computer science major will have gained basic understanding that will help them to evaluate the role of technology in business, academia and society more generally. Providing any barrier to that understanding is contrary to the mission of the University. The University, instead, should be doing everything in its power to encourage students to explore a field that will be so valuable in the future.
The board offers a compromise: While we believe that removing the P/D/F option from COS 126 is counterproductive and unfair to students, we also believe it would be unfair to the resources and faculty of the Department to make COS 217 and COS 226 P/D/F-able. Students enrolling in these courses already have some sense of their competency as computer science students and thus do not need the P/D/F option. Pursuant to the goals of the computer science department’s new policy, removing the P/D/F option from these courses would likely lead to some reduction in student demand.
The board also encourages the University administration to provide ample resources to ensure that the Department of Computer Science can continue to provide these important and desirable courses as successfully as they have in the past.
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