An actual course (with credit) for this?  I disagree.<p>You don&#x27;t need a prep course if you actually know the material.  The problem is that, when pursuing a CS degree, you play academic whack-a-mole over a 4-year period, and students forget things because they do not use that basic skill often enough.<p>I suggest that Universities require a continuous, 0-credit course that requires students to flex their CS skills and keep them fresh.<p>A good analogy would be my BM in Piano Performance, in which we were required to pass 8 (eight!) semesters of a 0-credit class.  This class had requirements including performing every semester in front of other students, attending other&#x27;s performances, local and out-of-city concerts (symphony or opera, at our own cost, usually 2-3 hours of travel each direction, on our own time), testing over general music knowledge and terminology, etc.  We did this every semester!  Basically, it was the long thread of practical involvement throughout our musical education.  (I laugh at CS students who think attending a Hack-a-thon should be worth extra credit!)<p>CS should be similar.  The problem is that there is no unifying theme to keep students grounded and fresh in the skills relevant to their vocational future.  Students do little projects here and there, using code that nobody else will ever have to see or work with, and that they themselves will abandon after a few weeks.  They don&#x27;t spend time on anything long enough to learn the ins and outs of a language, paradigm, or code set.  They don&#x27;t have to re-write and redesign the same API three times in order to make it more powerful or flexible.<p>I will state it again, just to be clear on my stance:  You don&#x27;t need a prep course if you actually know the material.  Period.  If you say that your students need a prep course, then you are not teaching them correctly.  (I&#x27;m not saying that the educational content is lacking, I&#x27;m saying that the pedagogical approach is flawed.)<p>(For more context: I don&#x27;t just have a music degree.  I also have a MS in CS, and am in my 3rd year of PhD work in CS.  I plan to be a professor, so this is actually a subject that I am very passionate about.)