> According to Berkeleytime, 35.3% of CS 10 students and 10.6% of CS 61A students received F’s in spring 2026. In spring 2025 and spring 2024, the percentage of F’s did not exceed 10% for either class.

I don't think instruction would've changed drastically in the last year though.

The fact that you are talking about Dan Garcia, a huge figure in computing education research and an excellent teacher, and the Beauty and Joy of Computing curriculum makes this hilarious. You should look up some details about both.

University education is weird. Research profs (who make up a large fraction of all profs in a typical R1 institution), are hired for research ability and are only minimally evaluated on teaching ability. Furthermore, few research profs actually receive any kind of mandatory training on how to teach; a typical research prof might be assigned a course to teach and then just let loose to do so on the first day of the semester. If a prof actually cares they may attend some optional teaching training - but I stress that these are optional at many of the institutions I know of. (I suppose if someone gets really bad teaching evals they may be advised to attend said trainings - but for a tenured prof, that's just advice).

Worse, a decent chunk of research profs will treat teaching as a burden that just has to be done - a distraction from their exciting world-changing research. So, you get attitudes like the ones you mentioned.

I'm actually not sure why the system is set up to assume that profs who are good at research are automatically suited to teach classes, but that is how it's setup.

I really wonder if it's important to learn all that low-level stuff at this point. Most programmers today will never write a binary tree or a hash table. Modern high-performance ones are generic components you get from libraries. Even MIT gave up on teaching from Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.

I got all that stuff. I've wired up a 4-bit adder on a solderless breadboard for an architecture class. I used to have a well-thumbed copy of Knuth handy. I've designed and built a switching power supply. But I'm not up to date on using Claude Code, and should be.

> I felt frustrated that the professors didn't ever teach. They had slides. They read off slides, verbatim. They explained things sometimes if you asked them, but most often in a very elitist and condescending tone

+10000. The goddamn slides. If I were a student now going to engineering school, I'd basically take the slides and throw them into NotebookLM and get way better lectures. Then I'd ask claude or GPT all my hard questions. Hell, I'd get the PDF version of my textbooks and do the same.

The number of lectures actually worthy of your time was so low.

Berkeley CS does teach for real

Garcia and Ranade are Teaching Professors. Their primary responsibility is to teach, develop curriculum, and do pedagogical research. This job posting explains: https://saberbio.wildapricot.org/Job-board/12919068