How Do Curricular Design Changes Impact Computer Science Programs?: A Case Study at San Pablo Catholic University in Peru
, Germain Garcia-Zanabria 1, Alex J. Cuadros-Vargas 1, Guillermo Camara-Chavez 1,2, Jorge Poco 1,3 and Erick Gomez-Nieto 1Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The paper makes an approach to a topic with some importance in the field of higher education in Computer Science. The case study presented is very specific and, being a legitimate object of study, it does not provide clear future research clues or open opportunities for extrapolations to other realities and settings. For these reasons, I think it is not a tool for future theoretical support, but just a research on a very restricted subject on a specific reality and context.
The theoretical support is sufficient and the methodology is sophisticated and adequate to the research. Nevertheless, the authors make choices such as the social origin of students, which should be given greater clarity. The use of the HDI by city, for example, is calculated for a set of population, which does not imply that the socio-economic stratum of the students is the same as that of their city of origin. The parents' professions, or the division by income classes, where the students come from, would be more appropriate.
In the answers to the research questions, only the results are presented without looking for the deeper and explanatory causes for the given phenomena. For example, the decrease of female students throughout the statistical series is only a description of the percentages, but the causes for that decrease, whether economic, social, conjunctural or structural, are not explored for a better understanding of this female population behavior. The study of behavior and the causes that lead students to have these choices remains unanswered.
The conclusions presented are somewhat disappointing given the complex methodologies that led the study.
English, although clear, should be revised.
Author Response
We are grateful for their invaluable comments and suggestions to our paper titled How do curricular design changes impact computer science programs? A case study at San Pablo Catholic University in Peru.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
How do curricular design changes impact computer science programs?: A case study at San Pablo Catholic University in Peru
This paper focuses on curricular changes’ influence on students’ unbalancing gender and socioeconomic provenance and dropout. Three different approaches for data analysis were applied, a longitudinal study of four curricula from Informatics Engineering to Computer Science transition, an exploratory analysis for identifying essential features that determines the events mentioned above, and a survival analysis to estimate the probability that a student stay (not dropout) before graduate, and calculate the average permanence time per curricula. The results are discussed within the field’s interest.
The paper presents a very interesting research. The introduction section is informative, while the empirical part is well presented. The hypotheses are clear and the finding are striking and presented in a comprehensive way. The different data analyses and recordings are an advantage, which give a status of scientific rigor to this work.
Author Response
We are grateful for their invaluable comments and suggestions to our paper titled How do curricular design changes impact computer science programs?: A case study at San Pablo Catholic University in Peru.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
