ACM/IEEE curriculum guidelines for computer science, such as CS2013 or the forthcoming CS2023, provide well-researched and detailed guidance about the content and skills that make up an undergraduate computer science (CS) program. Liberal arts CS programs often struggle to apply these guidelines within their institutional context and goals. Historically, this has been addressed through the development of model CS curricula tailored for the liberal arts context. We take a different position: that no single model curriculum can apply across the wide range of liberal arts institutions. Instead, we argue that liberal arts CS educators need best practices for using guidelines such as CS2023 to inform curriculum design. These practices must acknowledge the opportunities and priorities of a liberal arts philosophy as well as a program's mission and identity. This paper reviews the context and motivation behind computing in the liberal arts. We also review the history of liberal arts CS educators and ACM/IEEE curriculum guidelines. We present data and trends about liberal arts computing programs, discussing how this informs curriculum design. Finally, we propose a process that guides programs to work with curriculum guidelines through the lens of institutional and program missions and identities, goals, and situational factors.

Holland-Minkley, Amanda, Jakob Barnard, Valerie Barr, Grant Braught, Janet Davis, David Reed, Karl Schmitt, Andrea Tartaro, and James D. Teresco. Computer Science Curriculum Guidelines: A New Liberal Arts Perspective. In SIGCSE 2023: Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, Vol. 1, 617–623. New York, NY: Association for Computing Machinery, 2023. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3545945.3569793

© 2023 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).

This is an Open Access publication licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Grant Braught is a professor of Computer Science at Dickinson College.

This published version is made available on Dickinson Scholar with the permission of the publisher. For more information on the published version, visit The ACM Digital Library's Website. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3545945.3569793

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