skalawag's comments

One glaring problem with the proposal is that, even where we can expect university curricula have even treatment across universities (the hard sciences, say), university curricula simply are _not_ the same. Nor are the students who take them. Does anyone really think that courses taught at (say) regional universities and the students that get through them can be measured alongside the courses/students at top tier universities? That's unlikely. For one, the students were more or less uniformly measured going in and found to differ significantly. Second, I doubt the curricula are comparable in terms of depth and coverage (I can't prove it, of course, but my experience suggests that this is so).

To be clear, I am _not_ saying there are not good courses/universities outside the top tier. I know of some. But I think that on balance, my claim would hold up.

eric schlosser is an historian. not that i think it is a good idea to maintain our nuclear arsenal, but i think an historian's opinion here is ... well, a bit out of line?

an activity's being called "software engineering" does not make it any more likely to be a form of engineering than one's being called "armstrong" makes one more likely to be strong. we might as well call it "software writing." it is obvious that lives will depend on some software working as expected. the solution is not to license the writers of the software, but to make sure software doesn't fail in ways that could end lives. a certification scheme doesn't add anything to the solution of this problem if the solution doesn't already exist.