Outsourcing Education

I thought some people might find this entertaining. The following is an unedited and recent quote from a teaching assistant ( who speaks teaching assistant quality english ) responding to a question in a newsgroup for a relatively high level undergraduate computer science class at a top 10 CS school in the US:

Quote:

On -Date Removed-, -Student Name Removed- wrote: > For the Fibonacci program it doesn't specify whether we should use a > recursive approach or a non-recursive approach... Is this upto us? Is there > any that's preferred? Hi, Its upto you to decide if you want to iterate over many imputs or just end with one input. Whatever it is, make sure , the code works fine :) -TA Name Removed- PS: Recursion is calling itself. So, Recursion may not be the correct term here ... its rather iterating over the input-output loop many times.

This could fit alongside the all the tech support jokes, but it's kind of sad at the same time. TA's are supposed to aid in educating the 'computer scientists of tommorow'. If these TAs were educated by the 'computer scientists of yesterday' then I shudder to think what tommorow holds. Do you think it would be wrong for schools to effectively discriminate in the selection of teaching assistants? By this I mean that schools would require that applicants meet a certain level of 'communication ability', rather than nothing more than a GPA of 'x.y'? This would 'weed out' a vast majority of otherwise qualified teaching assistants. The fact of the matter is that postgraduate education in computer science in the United States is primarily a foreign affair, so to speak.