research-article

A Tale of Two Majors: When Information Technology is Embedded within a Department of Computer Science

Authors:

Prateek Basavaraj,

Karla Badillo-Urquiola,

Pamela J. WisniewskiAuthors Info & Claims

SIGITE '18: Proceedings of the 19th Annual SIG Conference on Information Technology Education

Pages 32 - 37

https://doi.org/10.1145/3241815.3241868

Published: 14 September 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Student success is one of the most widely discussed topics in the higher education literature. One understudied factor that may have a significant impact on student success is the effect of co-locating two different undergraduate programs - specifically, Computer Science (CS) and Information Technology (IT) - in the same department. In this paper, we examine student data from the IT and CS undergraduate programs at a large, public university to identify and compare the paths of IT and CS students, who started the program in Fall 2008 and dropped out, changed their major, or successfully completed the program by Summer 2013. We also conducted an open-ended survey of 165 IT and CS students to determine their perceptions of the two programs. Our results suggest a tiered relationship between the two programs, where CS appears to be a more volatile and rigorous of a major in terms of student pathways and perceptions. We conclude that social comparisons that occur due to the way these programs were established at the target university contribute to this imbalance. Based on our analyses, we propose measures to mitigate negative social comparisons between the two programs and make IT a standalone program contributing to student success.

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Cited By

Chen CChen SCui KZhong Z(2024)ETVis: a visual analytics system for high school entrance examination results and mobility patternsJournal of Visualization10.1007/s12650-024-01038-1Online publication date: 20-Dec-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12650-024-01038-1
Oran AMartin AKlymkowsky MStubbs R(2022)Identifying Students’ Progress and Mobility Patterns in Higher Education Through Open-Source Visualization2022 IEEE Integrated STEM Education Conference (ISEC)10.1109/ISEC54952.2022.10025315(154-161)Online publication date: 26-Mar-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/ISEC54952.2022.10025315
Kaplan A(2021)A Dev-Ops Practicum Course for Information Technology Majors2021 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI)10.1109/CSCI54926.2021.00204(872-877)Online publication date: Dec-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/CSCI54926.2021.00204
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Index Terms

A Tale of Two Majors: When Information Technology is Embedded within a Department of Computer Science
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing education
      1. Computing education programs
        Information technology education

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cover image ACM Conferences

SIGITE '18: Proceedings of the 19th Annual SIG Conference on Information Technology Education

September 2018

204 pages

ISBN:9781450359542

DOI:10.1145/3241815

General Chairs:
Tom Ayers
Broward College, USA
,
Steve Zilora
Rochester Institute of Technology, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Bryan Goda
University of Washington | Tacoma, USA
,
Daniel Bogaard
Rochester Institute of Technology, USA

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SIGITE: ACM Special Interest Group on Information Technology Education

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 14 September 2018

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Targeted Educational Attainment (TEAm) Grant

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SIGITE '18

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SIGITE

SIGITE '18: The 19th Annual Conference on Information Technology Education

October 3 - 6, 2018

Florida, Fort Lauderdale, USA

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SIGITE '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 24 of 59 submissions, 41%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 176 of 429 submissions, 41%

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Cited By

Chen CChen SCui KZhong Z(2024)ETVis: a visual analytics system for high school entrance examination results and mobility patternsJournal of Visualization10.1007/s12650-024-01038-1Online publication date: 20-Dec-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12650-024-01038-1
Oran AMartin AKlymkowsky MStubbs R(2022)Identifying Students’ Progress and Mobility Patterns in Higher Education Through Open-Source Visualization2022 IEEE Integrated STEM Education Conference (ISEC)10.1109/ISEC54952.2022.10025315(154-161)Online publication date: 26-Mar-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/ISEC54952.2022.10025315
Kaplan A(2021)A Dev-Ops Practicum Course for Information Technology Majors2021 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI)10.1109/CSCI54926.2021.00204(872-877)Online publication date: Dec-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/CSCI54926.2021.00204
Zheng YKhazanchi DSiy HGrispos GKwaku Setor T(2020)SIGITE and SIGCSE SymposiumsProceedings of the 21st Annual Conference on Information Technology Education10.1145/3368308.3415400(132-137)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3368308.3415400
Basavaraj PGaribay IGoda BZilora SGrispos GBogaard D(2019)Enhancing the Program Quality and College-Level Success Metrics of an IT Program at a Large Public UniversityProceedings of the 20th Annual SIG Conference on Information Technology Education10.1145/3349266.3351418(16-21)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3349266.3351418

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