Bachelor of Science in Computer Science \& Engineering
(BS in CS\&E)*
*The BS in CS&E program is in the Computer and Information Science Department in the College of Engineering of the Ohio State University; the Department also offers several other programs, for example, a BS in Computer and Information Science degree (in the {\em College of Arts and Sciences). Only the BS in CS&E is being evaluated.
Conventional day classes.
The program has not been previously evaluated by the EAC.
This section is not required by the ABET guidelines but has been included in order to briefly summarize some recent major developments in the Computer Science & Engineering (CS&E) program and in the Computer and Information Science Department. The first five items below have to do with courses in the program, the next has to do with processes, the next with faculty hiring, and the last two with facilities. \vc
The capstone design course on Software Engineering is the most popular of all our capstone design courses. We have been able to hire practicing software engineers from local industry to teach this course. Although we started doing this mainly because of a shortage of faculty in the area (more on this in a later bullet), it has provided a significant benefit since these outside instructors, being active practitioners of software engineering, are able to bring their real-world experience into the classroom. And since these instructors obtained their graduate degrees from our Department in the recent past, they are also intimately familiar with the program, and are able to relate well to the students.
A new 3-credit course (694??) in this area dealing with multi-media networking is currently under development. An initial version of this course was piloted in Autumn '98; student feedback on this pilot was very positive. A second pilot is expected to be offered next year, and we will then try to make this into a permanent course.
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This section is organized as follows: The next two paragraphs speak to the quality of our students and the high demand from industry for our graduates. In section 1.1 we detail the processes used evaluating, advising, and monitoring our students, in a manner consistent with Criterion 1. In 1.2 we describe the procedures used to ensure that all students meet all program requirements. And in 1.3 we describe the policies and procedures used for acceptance of transfer students and for validation of courses taken for credit elsewhere.
Our students are of high quality and perform well in a demanding curriculum. The average ACT scores for students admitted into the program last year was 26.5. The average gpa of our students is 2.91. The student population is fairly diverse, with about 13\% being women and about 23\% minorities\footnote{The 23\% figure includes students of Asian origin; if we exclude those, the figure is 12\%.. We have a designated faculty advisor, currently Professor Rick Lewis, who is available to advise women and minority students.
Average time to complete the degree is 5.3 years. A large percentage of our students gain work experience and support their education through part-time employment on a continuing basis, as well as through participation in co-op programs and summer internships. Our graduates are highly sought after by major companies; companies that have recently recruited our graduates include Adobe Systems, Boeing, CompuServe, FedEx, IBM, Lucent, MicroSoft, Motorola, Proctor & Gamble, etc. Average starting salaries for our graduates are over \$40,000 per year. About 6.5\% of our graduates enter graduate school immediately after completion of the program; we should note that an important reason why relatively few of our graduates go on to graduate school is the very strong demand for them from industry.
Another important technique we use to determine our success in meeting program objectives is a self-evaluation by students, in the form of an on-line Exit-survey that all students must complete prior to graduation. A key component of this survey asks the students to rank, on a scale of `Strongly Disagree' through `Strongly Agree', for each of our objectives whether that objective was met for the particular student completing the survey. The survey is anonymous\footnote{A separate list of id numbers of the students completing the survey is maintained to ensure that all students do in fact complete the survey before graduation., and this ensures that students give us their true opinions of how well the program has met its objectives in their particular case. On a regular basis, the survey answers are averaged by assigning appropriate weights to the various possible responses, and the results made available to the Undergraduate Studies Committee, (as well as any interested students and faculty.
Students are advised and their progress monitored by a professional Advising office staffed by a full-time Academic Advisor (Ms.~Peg Steele) who is assisted by two Graduate Administrative Associates, and by the faculty as described below: \vc
The minimum cphr requirement for admission to the CSE major\footnote{This requirement also applies to the CIS major; the CIS major is not being evaluated by ABET. is currently 2.4 (on a 4.0 scale) and will increase to 2.8 starting Summer 1999. During the winter quarter of each year, the Undergraduate Studies Committee of the Department evaluates both expected demand for the major(s) as well as the faculty and other resources for the coming year and decides whether to propose, to the faculty, any change in this requirement. If a change is proposed, the entire faculty discusses it and votes on it. If the new requirement is approved, all pre-majors are immediately notified by US mail and by announcements on electronic newsgroups; the requirement then goes into effect the following summer quarter.
The evaluation, advising, and monitoring students just described ensures that students are well aware of all program requirements and that they continue to make reasonable progress toward completing the requirements. The `application to graduate' and the associated processes described next, ensures that all students meet all program requirements before graduation.
Two quarters prior to graduation, students are required to file a formal application to graduate. The application has to be approved by both the Departmental Advising office and the Office for Degree Certification of the College of Engineering. The application provides details about all the courses the student has taken, the grades in those courses, as well as the courses the student intends to take in the next two quarters. The Advising office and the Graduation Advisor (College of Engineering) review the application carefully to ensure that the student has met all the program requirements, including the completion of the on-line exit-survey mentioned in section 1.1 (and again in section 2).
Students may petition the Chair of the Undergraduate Studies Committee to have one or more of their major requirements waived but such petitions are approved only after careful consideration and only if doing so would not make a material difference to the strength of the program. For example, recently a transfer student who had credit for an Astronomy course was allowed to use that to partly meet the Physics requirement; on the other hand, a petition (from a different student) to use a course on Software Engineering (CIS~757) as the capstone design course was not approved since, although design tasks do play an important role in that course, there is no large scale design project in CIS~757.
For petitions involving the General Education portion of the program, the petition is first reviewed by Departmental Advising office, and then forwarded to the Petitions Committee of the College; again, these petitions are approved after careful consideration, provided doing so would not materially diminish the strength of the program.
The Department treats the question of transfer credits seriously both in order to ensure that students get credit for coursework they have performed elsewhere, and to ensure that transfer students are indeed well prepared to continue with the rest of the CS&E program. With this in mind, transfer credits are handled by a two-tier system. The Department supplies the University Admissions Office with a transfer-credit-course list identifying specific courses from specific universities and the equivalent courses in our program. The correctness and currency of this list is evaluated annually. Any student who has taken course $X$ in university $Y$, upon filing the requisite application with the Admissions Office, gets transfer credit for the equivalent course $Z$ of the CS&E program as per this list.
Since there are frequent instances where students believe they ought to receive transfer credit for a specific course although the corresponding entry does not appear on the transfer-credit-course list, the Department also has a designated faculty member who acts as a transfer-credit-coordinator. This coordinator is appointed by the Chair of the Department on an annual basis and receives a reduction of one-half course in his teaching responsibilities. The University Admissions Office refers to this coordinator all cases that cannot be resolved on the basis of the list supplied to them. Prof.~Doug~Kerr is the current (1997-98) transfer credit coordinator.
One important issue having to do with transfer credits concerns the sequence CIS 221, 222, 321. As noted in the first bullet in section 1.4, these three courses form a tightly integrated sequnence focusing on Software Engineering issues, rather than mere programming experience in a particular language. We often have students who may have taken a first course in programming at another university, and these students assume that they would get transfer credit for, say, CIS 221. But even if the course the student has taken elsewhere provided him or her considerable programming experience, giving such credit would not be in the best interest of the student unless the student has also learned and internalized the relevant software engineering principles. Hence in such cases, Prof.~Kerr consults closely with Professors Bruce Weide and Tim Long, the people who designed the 221, 222, 321 sequence, before awarding such credit. In rare cases, where the student has taken a year-long sequence of courses with a strong software engineering focus, he or she may receive credit for the entire sequence.
This section is organized as follows: In section 2.1 we discuss our published educational objectives and relate them to our mission. In section 2.2 we outline the processes used to determine and evaluate these objectives. In section 2.3 we show how our curriculum and processes ensure the achievement of our objectives. And in section 2.4 we describe our system of ongoing evaluation of the program.
The educational objectives of the CS&E program have been published both on the Departmental web pages and in hard-copy literature of the College of Engineering. Our educational objectives are as follows:\vc
A key part of the mission of our Department is `to educate undergraduate and graduate majors in computer science and engineering', and the educational objectives enumerated above are clearly consistent with this mission. Similarly they are consistent with the mission of the College of Engineering, in particular with its mission `to educate professionals in engineering and architecture'.
Corresponding to each of our four objectives, we have identified (and published on the Departmental web pages) specific, detailed, outcomes. In the listing below of these outcomes, 1a, 1b, 1c are the outcomes corresponding to objective 1, and similarly for each of the other objectives: \vc
Input from current students is obtained via a number of mechanisms. First, we have student representatives on key committees, including the Undergraduate Studies Committee, the Curriculum Committee, and the Computer Committee. Second, an open Undergraduate forum is held each year to discuss all aspects of our program, including its objectives. The forum is held typically early in the Spring quarter and is attended by interested students, key faculty members, and the Academic advisor. Announcements about the forum are made widely, including on the electronic newsgroups to ensure wide participation. Following the forum, a summary of the discussion is posted on the newsgroups by the Chair of the Undergraduate Studies Committee; this is usually by further extended discussions where students (including those who could not attend the forum) further express their opinions and ideas on the program. Third, as noted in section B.1.2, before graduation, students are required to complete an (on-line) exit-survey; one portion of this survey asks students to rate the importance (on a scale of `very unimportant' to `very important') of each of our objectives as well as each of the corresponding outcomes listed above. On a regular basis, the survey answers are averaged by assigning appropriate weights to the various possible responses, and the results made available to the members of the Undergraduate Studies Committee, as well as other interested students and faculty.
Input from alumni is obtained by means of an anonymous (hard-copy) survey. Each year this survey is mailed out to alumni who graduated either two years ago or six years ago; this allows us to gather input from alumni who graduated relatively recently as well as some who graduated a while ago, without at the same time asking for input from the same group of people year after year. The College of Engineering keeps track of alumni addresses etc., and mails out the surveys, collects the returned surveys, and forwards them to the program. As in the case of the exit-survey, the responses from the alumni survey are averaged by assigning appropriate weights to the various possible responses, and the results made available to the members of the Undergraduate Studies Committee, as well as other interested students and faculty.
Unfortunately, unlike in the case of the student exit-survey, the current version of the alumni survey does not ask respondents to rank the importance of of our objectives, it only asks how well each objective was met. Next year we will revise the alumni survey to include a ranking of the importance of our objectives. Further, we will also include, again as in the exit-survey, the specific outcomes listed earlier corresponding to each objective rather than just the high-level objectives.
Input from supervisors/managers of our graduates is similarly obtained by means of a survey conducted annually. The survey has two components, the first asks the manager to rate the importance of various objectives and outcomes, the second asks him or her to rate how well graduates of our program were trained with respect to each objective and outcome. We faced two problems in this survey. First was the question of asking supervisors to rate how well their employees were prepared by our program, and the likely unwillingness of managers to answer such questions because of legal and privacy considerations. If this turns out to be a major issue with a serious impact on the return rates of the surveys, we may have to eliminate the second component of the survey.
The second problem we faced with respect to this survey was that of generating a list of names of managers who would be able to complete such a survey. By consensus among the programs in the College of Engineering, it was decided that students who graduated from the College of Engineering 15 years ago are now likely to be in managerial positions, hence it would be appropriate, each year, to send out the survey for that year to alumni of the College who graduated 15 years ago. Again, the College sends out the survey, collects the completed surveys, and forwards them to the program. As in the case of the exit-surveys and alumni-surveys, the responses from the manager-surveys are appropriately weighted and averaged and made available to the members of the Undergraduate Studies Committee and other interested students and faculty.
The Undergraduate Studies Committee which is a standing committee of the faculty initiates discussions on program objectives and outcomes, taking into account the inputs from the various constituencies. The meetings of the committee are announced in advance on student and faculty newsgroups and are open to all interested students and faculty. The minutes of the meetings are posted on the newsgroups. Following extensive discussions in the committee, the current set of objectives and outcomes (listed in section 2.1) were presented to the entire faculty in the fall quarter of '97 and were approved by the faculty. The objectives and outcomes were also presented to the Department's industrial advisory board at about the same time for their comments and feedback.
The feedback we have received so far from our surveys is that our current set of objectives and outcomes are most appropriate. By the end of the next academic year (1999-2000), the survey mechanisms would have been in place for about two years; further, by then we should have received the first set of results from our improved alumni survey. At that time we will undertake a careful review of all the feedback and identify any changes that need to be made. It is worth repeating though that the feedback so far has been very positive, and so any changes are likely to be in the relative stress that is placed on the outcomes listed in 2.1, rather than in wholesale changes in the objectives.
Two important constituencies that we have not discussed above are prospective students (and their parents), as well as recruiters of students who are close to graduating from our program. Members of the Undergraduate Studies Committee and the Academic advisor meet with members of both constituencies whenever they visit campus and get informal feedback from them on our objectives and outcomes. This feedback is also incorporated into our deliberations in the Committee; we are investigating ways to formalize this process, perhaps in the form, for example, of a brief survey asking recruiters and prospective students (and parents) to rank the importance of our objectives and outcomes.