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(arg can't reply to your reply) this is actually quite important ... let me keep looking into this. sorry there's a giant backlog of (often angry!) emails in my inbox right now ... might not be able to sort thru them all :)

i wish the blogging platform supported some version-control friendly format.

[Edit: I made a typo about Penn CS120 ... I mistakenly found another course named CS120 that wasn't at Penn. Also, Harvard CS51 calls itself "Computer Science II" [1], implying that it's a CS2 course. It probably has CS50 as a prereq, tho I haven't double-checked yet.]

[1] http://cs51.seas.harvard.edu/docs/lectures/2013/1-overview.p...

It depends on what CS1 really means. I do think cs51 is comparable to CIS120 at Penn, and I think the later is pretty clearly CS1. That said, I find it hard to really figure out what the precise criteria are. It's pretty clear that Harvard encourages concentrators to take cs50, but I think the same course at other institutions would often be skipped by concentrators.

@yminsky -- yep, taxonomies r hard :) but i'm trying to go as much as possible by what each department proclaims for itself rather than trying to calibrate across departments. If Harvard calls a class "Computer Science II", I'm going to consider it as CS2. (fwiw I consider Harvard CS50 a hybrid of CS0 and CS1 since students voluntarily split themselves into two tracks called "less comfortable" and "more comfortable", respectively.)

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