Re: [ossig] (Fwd) STI News: Firm discovers good IT help hard to find

["TM Tan (aka Meng)" <tmtan@tm.net.my>]

> We
> have the brightest ppl from Malaysia scoring straight A’s in SPM and STPM
> or so in the local university. Are they merely having a good memory? I
> don’t think so. If u hv taken those exam before. You will know they are
> just not testing your memory but also your understanding and analysis
> skill. Do they have the wrong attitudes? I don’t think so either. Scoring
> straight A’s is not easy, it require lot of hard works, diligent,
> determination and consistency. A person attitude won’t change!
>  in sudden after admitting to university. Are our people not smart enough?
>  er.. isn't it the STPM standard equal if not higher then A level. Then,
>  what’s wrong here??? 

Nothing wrong with the people.....I think it is that many IT syllabuses are not longer teaching 
they students the founding principles. They are filled with superficial knowledge ...for 
example, many so called IT courses teach HTML ! Why should they teach HTML ? Total 
waste of time. 

One example:
When I learnt programming we were taught algorithms in a pseudo language. In the labs we 
had to translate this pseudo language algorihms into real programming languages like pascal 
and ada. Pascal being the teaching language of choice back in the 80s. The point being we 
were taught the principles of programming which was language independent. We also had 
courses teaching non procedural languages like lisp and prolog which taught us to think of 
programs differently. 

Now, they teach students to write visual basic programs....no principles taught here, just one 
non standard implementation of an old teaching language, which leads to bad programmer 
portability. 
What happened to teaching good programming principles in pascal ? 

Cheers

Meng


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