Incorporating Computing Professionals’ Know-how: Differences between Assessment by Students, Academics, and Professional Experts

It is important for both computer science academics and students to clearly comprehend the differences between academic and professional perspectives in terms of assessing a deliverable. It is especially interesting to determine whether the aspects deemed important to evaluate by a computer science expert are the same as those established by academics and students. Such potential discrepancies are indicative of the unexpected challenges students may encounter once they graduate and begin working. In this article, we propose a learning activity in which computer science students made a video about their future profession after hearing an expert in the field who discussed about the characteristics and difficulties of his or her work. Academics, professional experts, and students assessed the videos by means of a questionnaire. This article reports a quantitative study of the results of this experience, which was conducted for three academic years. The study involved 63 students, 6 academics, and 4 computing professionals with extensive experience, and 14 videos were evaluated. Professional experts proved to be the most demanding in the assessment, followed by academics. The least demanding group was the students. These differences are more salient if more substantial issues are examined. The experts focused more on aspects of content, whereas the student preferred to concentrate on format. The academics’ focus falls between these two extremes. Understanding how experts value knowledge can guide educators in their search for effective learning environments in computing education.