New Etish-Andrews Scholarship honors retiring I-Center director’s commitment to financial inclusivity see FEATURES / PAGE 4
VOLLEYBALL
Jumbos build momentum with weekend sweep
‘The Hate U Give’ offers an unflinching depiction of racial violence, challenges viewers to reflect on their silence see ARTS&LIVING / PAGE 7
SEE SPORTS / BACK PAGE
THE
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T HE T UFTS DAILY
VOLUME LXXVI, ISSUE 33
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Wednesday, October 24, 2018
MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, MASS.
CIRCLE finds young people more civically engaged than ever
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Tufts students register to vote at Civics Fest, an event celebrating National Voter Registration Day, on Sept. 26, 2017. by Jillian Rolnick
Contributing Writer
The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and
Engagement (CIRCLE) at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life released a series of findings recently that suggest that young people are more engaged in the upcoming midterm elections than per-
haps ever before. The results, three sets of which have been released to the public, reveal that America’s youth are planning to head to the polls in large numbers to make a difference in 2018, according
to Director for Communication, Strategy and Planning at Tisch College Jennifer McAndrew. CIRCLE partnered with polling firm GfK to survey 2,087 people, aged 18–24, through an online questionnaire from Sept. 5–26, McAndrew said. She also explained that the poll contained a representative oversample of people aged 18–21 who are new to voting, as well as black and Latinx young people. The first finding of the series, released on Oct. 9, focused on young people’s likelihood to vote, how campaigns contacted young people and voter choice, according to McAndrew. Reynol Junco, a senior researcher at CIRCLE, found this part of the poll results to be extremely encouraging about the youth vote. According to the poll, 34 percent of young respondents are “extremely likely to vote” in the upcoming midterm election. According to McAndrew, this would be a historic turnout for young people in a midterm election, who have not turned out in a rate higher than 31 percent for a midterm election since the Census Bureau began recording such data in 1966. She thought it promising that the youngest voters are planning to turn out in greater numbers. see CIRCLE, page 2
Computer science department introduces application for COMP 40 enrollment by Robert Kaplan Contributing Writer
The growing popularity of COMP 40, a core requirement for the computer science major and the new data science major, has forced the Department of Computer Science (CS) to introduce an online application system to limit the number of students who can enroll for the course on SIS this fall, according to Kathleen Fisher, department chair and professor. “The number of students in these programs has grown substantially over the past five years,” she said. COMP 40’s relatively inflexible course capacity is the result of a number of factors, including a lack of availability of computer labs and large classrooms, limited funding for teaching assistants and too few faculty members to increase the number of sections offered, according to Fisher.
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Alva Couch, an associate professor of CS and co-director of data science, agreed that limited faculty resources make expansion difficult. He explained that most COMP 40 instructors require a substantial and diverse knowledge-base of the industry as well as the teaching skills necessary for a large, feedback-driven class. Couch said that as a result, additional faculty cannot easily be used to expand the course capacity. “There are very few people who can teach COMP 40, and we have two of them,” Couch said. Due to limited available space and long wait lists, the department began prioritizing admissions for majors to the course a few years ago, according to Fisher. The current system for determining priority admission gathers information from students so that the course instructor may make an informed decision based, in part, on the student’s likelihood of pursing a major in computer science, Fisher said.
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“The priority system was devised to make sure students are able to take the course at the most suitable time in their academic program,” Fisher said. “[Students] also get to explain anything unusual about their circumstances for wanting to take COMP 40.” Fisher noted that these circumstances may include conflicting terms spent studying abroad and early graduation. The limitations of SIS itself was one factor leading to the creation of an independent system because faculty faced a host of challenges in trying to control enrollment in COMP 40 through SIS, according to Couch. This leads to an accounting error, even as faculty try to predict the enrollment of the course before registration opens, Couch explained. Fisher criticized the responsiveness of SIS in recording students’ major declarations as a difficulty in
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determining students’ priority to enroll in COMP 40. “SIS is slow to record major declarations … and thus cannot accurately give priority to students who have declared,” Fisher said. Zoe Hsieh, a first-year considering a major in data science, understood the rationale behind the department’s priority enrollment system. “I plan on taking COMP 40 next year, so I want to make sure I get in when I need to take it,” Hsieh said. “Given the high cost of tuition, graduating late because of one class would be terrible.” According to the CS department’s course registration guide, direct enrollment in COMP 40 in the spring will be limited to undeclared first-years or sophomores and computer science students. Fisher said that the department also con-
NEWS............................................1 FEATURES.................................4 ARTS & LIVING.......................6
see COMP 40, page 2
FUN & GAMES.........................8 OPINION.....................................9 SPORTS............................ BACK