Analyzing the Strength of Undergraduate Misconceptions About Software Engineering

摘要

While many computer science students plan to pursue careers as software engineers, research shows that most traditional undergraduate CS programs fail to prepare students for the realities of programming in industry. Many misconceptions that are interfering with the transition to industry are belief-oriented, not skill-oriented, in nature, so traditional misconception assessments will not yield a deep understanding of them.In this paper we present a novel methodology that shows interactions among the misconceptions based on a forced choice paradigm and reveals the relative strength of the misconceptions. By analyzing students' repeated responses and response times, we construct a model of participants' misconceptions. We used this methodology to assess CS undergraduates at Carnegie Mellon University and compared their results to those from industry practitioners at several highly regarded companies. The results show that the students have misconceptions about process and teamwork. Surprisingly, we found that several misconceptions are correlated with elective courses that we expected to weaken misconceptions about software engineering but instead appeared to strengthen them.