Feedback from the Industrial Advisory Board

Each year, during the annual meeting of the CSE Department's Industrial Advisory Board (typically in late April/ early May), a presentation is made reporting on the state of the BS-CSE program, recent changes in courses, etc. to obtain feedback from the Board. Also included is a discussion of the program objectives to see if any changes in the objective might be called for. Starting in Spring '14, a brief summary of the presentation and the feedback from the Board has been created; these are available below.

• Spring 2016: my message to UGSC (on 21 April 2016):
  Yesterday morning I made a presentation to the dept.'s External Advisory Board about our undergrad programs. Usually these presentations tend not to be very useful but yesterday was a bit different. There were a lot of questions and comments. Here is a summary of the main points:
  1. Question: what has POCAT revealed and what have you done with that information?
     My answer: some weaknesses: e.g., in student understanding of databases, of binary representation/encoding of information, of analyzing algorithms ... We have tried to both tweak the POCAT questions to try to identify the precise problems and make some changes in relevant courses ...
     Question: what *strengths* has POCAT revealed?
     My answer: I was a bit stumped ... after a moment I responded that we tend to drop the questions that don't seem to indicate any problem in the program and focus on the weaknesses. The response was that may be we shouldn't do that because then, somewhere down the road, we might, when attempting to fix a weakness, do so by getting rid of something that contributes to a *strength* ... that was an interesting comment ...
  2. A main reason for my presentation is that ABET requires us to periodically review our "program educational objectives" to ensure that they "meet the needs of our constituencies". One approach that is commonly used by programs to meet this requirement is to obtain feedback from their advisory boards about their objectives and that was my intent as well. Usually the members of the adv. board don't have any comment about our objectives but this time they did have some comments, specifically about (III):
     III. Graduates will be informed and involved members of their communities, and responsible engineering and computing professionals.
     Someone asked me to explain what that meant and I talked about how, given the increasing importance of privacy and such things, we expect our students to have a reasonable understanding of these issues as well as some idea of the ACM/IEEE code, etc. I also talked about CSE 2501 and the new philosophy course. Following that there was a suggestion that the word "ethics" or the phrase "computing ethics" (or something similar) or perhaps some mention of the professional code should be included in objective III. That makes sense ... So any suggestion for such revision is most welcome ...
     from later message to Jeremy and Al Cline: possible revision:
     III. Graduates will be informed and involved members of their communities, and responsible engineering and computing professionals who take appropriate account of such issues as privacy, security, copyright etc. in ways that are consistent with the ACM/IEEE Code of Conduct.
     Or another:
     III. Graduates will be informed and involved members of their communities, and responsible engineering and computing professionals engaged in critical discussions related to such questions as security, privacy, etc. in which computing plays an increasingly central role.
     Both Jeremy and Al preferred the first version. We will discuss this in the fall.
  3. The third item was a bit of a surprise. First, several of the people on the adv. board are our alums. One of them remembered her CSE 560 experience fondly! Some UGSC regulars may remember that in some earlier alumni surveys (or even exit surveys), students/ grads have indeed said very good things about how 560 helped them mature as CS professionals and helped them understand what it was all about. But this adv. board member just went on and on about it! The discussion then turned to whether we have not introduced a real hole in our program by replacing that course with courses such as 3901/ 3902. The main point that was made was that although it may be true that (nearly) no one writes such things as assemblers and loaders (by hand), it is important for computing professionals to have a deep understanding of how machines work at different levels, including the lowest levels. Such understanding will serve as the *foundation* for their long-term success as computing professionals. While having students work with current technology will indeed be valuable in terms of their being able to find internships and full-time jobs, that shouldn't come at the expense of foundations ...
     Interesting points that we may want to think about.
• Spring 2015: The IAB, at its meeting of April 10, 2015, approved the current PEOs; but one of the members pointed out that the last PEO, in fact, directly ties into a key mission of OSU as recently articulated by President Drake.

• Spring 2014: The CSE IAB met on April 25, 2014 for its annual meeting. One of the items discussed at the meeting was the status of the undergrad programs in the dept., including the courses offered, who teaches the courses (tenure-track faculty vs. full-time lecturers and senior lecturers vs. adjuncts vs. GTAs); the objectives of the BS-CSE program; assessment activities; etc. The slides from the presentation are available here.
  The members of the board were satisfied with the state of the program including the program objectives. One item that was discussed at some length was the fact that a large number of courses were taught by non-tenure-track faculty. This may be cause for concern; but, at the same time, some of the board members pointed out that having adjuncts who are active industry professionals teach some of the courses, especially ones on such topics as software engineering as well as the capstone design and other project-oriented courses, is entirely appropriate; and can, indeed, contribute, in a significant way, to preparing students, upon graduation, to be "employed in the computing profession, and will be engaged in learning, understanding, and applying new ideas and technologies as the field evolves" (program objective I).