A survey of introductory and advanced programming courses

In the process of establishing equitable and practical computer time allocations for our computer science courses this fall, we compared our seemingly high request with standards in other universities. Twenty-three private and state universities were chosen for the comparison and a questionnaire (appendix 1) was designed to elicit information about large introductory programming courses and more specialized systems programming/software engineering courses. The scope of the 25 item questionnaire covers course organization (size of class, number of meetings a week), course content (proficiency expected, languages used, size of programs written), and course budget (computer dollar allocation/ student, equipment and operating system used).