CSE Undergraduate Studies Committee
Minutes of Meetings (2010-'11)
Committee Members:
Paolo Bucci, Eric Fosler, Steve Lai, Rick Parent, Kitty Reeves, Neelam Soundarajan (Chair), Peg Steele, Radu Teodorescu, Bruce Weide; Michael Schoenberg (CSE student), Grant Curell (CSE student), ?? (CIS student).
The committee met several times during the quarter with most of the
committee including the CSE student reps attending.
Most of the meetings focused on the results of the Spring POCAT.
Since there were three POCAT sessions, using a slightly different tests,
there was a lot to talk about. Instead of detailed minutes of the
meetings, the discussions are summarized in the
POCAT evaluation page (id/pw required).
- We also discussed the results the BS-CSE exit survey.
The results are available
here. Results were similar
to those in previous years. One particular suggestion was that it would be
useful if students knew in advance how much effort (especially programming
effort) each course involved. We will see if there is a way to make this
information available. One issue here is that different sections of a
course sometimes require varying amounts of effort because different
instructors attach varying amounts of importance to implementation of
particular concepts. At the same timel the capstone courses and the other
courses that included substantial programming activities were well received
by the students.
- Because of the extended discussions of POCAT, we have not had much
time to talk about the preparations for the ABET evaluation.
The meetings were adjourned each time at about 11:30.
Last meeting of the quarter on 6/2 at 10:30.
At the meeting: Bucci, Lai, Parent, Reeves, Sivilotti, Schoenberg, Soundarajan, Steele, Teodorescu, Weide; Wayne Heym
- CSE 560: Wayne Heym reported on his experiences with CSE 560, focusing
on student activities related to team-work and communication skills. Here
are some of the key points that were made:
- The "interactive grading sessions" are very helpful in discovering
how much each student in the team contributed to the work.
- Currently, the assessment of students' work (in these activities)
is "holistic"; while this has worked reasonably, it would probably be
better to have a rubric that spells out specific dimensions along which
students will be evaluated and the specific characteristics/actions that
would correspond to different achievement levels for each dimension.This
would help both students and the graders (especially those who are new to
grading for the course). We will work on developing such a rubric (or
rubrics); the rubric should include dimensions related to both "soft"
skills as well as technical knowledge (see below).
- One important point was that the quality of a student's team work
often depends heavily on his or her understanding of the underlying
technical concepts. Thus what may seem to be poor team skills
or communication (with other team members and/or the instructor/grader)
skills may at least be partly due to weak technical knowledge. This has
to be accounted for in any rubric that we design.
- A key predictor (or may be it is a key cause) of successful
team work seems to be frequent meetings that all team members attend.
The unsuccessful teams tend to be ones where one or more team members
repeatedly miss meetings. (Hence an easily measured dimension in the
rubric should be the percentage of team meetings that the student
attends.)
- One common problem has been that of peer-evaluation.
Students tend not to assign low marks to their team members even when
the members in question are not contributing their share of effort to
the team's success. Rick, who teaches 682 (one of the capstone courses),
noted that one approach that he has used with some success is to tell
each student that they have a fixed number of points available that they
have to "distribute" to the various team members, based on the student's
assessment of the team members' work. Thus assigning high marks to
someone who made a poor contribution to the team's success would mean
the student would have to shortchange others who contributed effectively.
(This led to a general discussion of how to help students improve their
team skills. After the meeting, Kitty found some
interesting items on-line (not just the "birds" video in that page
but many of the other pages that are linked-to in that page).
It may be useful to refer students to this page (and other similar ones).)
- The technical quality of the projects, including such items as clear
encapsulation of each independent aspect of the system in its own
class (with suitable interfaces), has shown considerable improvement over
the last few years. This seems attributable to the introduction of CSE
421 as well as to some changes in CSE 321.
- POCAT: The test will be held in three sessions during the week of
April 18. Variations of several of the questions have been suggested by
involved faculty and these different versions will be used in the three
tests. We will analyze/evaluate the results in future meetings.
The meeting was adjourned at 11:30
Next meeting: 4/21/'11
At the meeting: Bucci, Parent, Reeves, Sivilotti, Schoenberg, Soundarajan, Weide
- POCAT: Steve Lai couldn't attend the meeting but sent some comments
about the 680-related question (involving the Master theorem). Performance
on this question was rather poor. Steve asked the question in his final
exam for the course and the performance was quite good. His suggestion was
that the theorem was important but it is not reasonable to expect students
to remember the details; and it was probably because they didn't remember
the details that performance on this question in the POCAT was poor whereas,
during the final exam for the course, they did remember the details and
performance was very good. One possible solution would be to include the
statement of the theorem as part of the question. If the results don't
improve, then we will have to probe further.
75 students are expected to take the POCAT this quarter.
This gives us an unusual opportunity, for example, to try multiple
versions of questions.
In fact, the idea
The meeting was adjourned at 11:30
Next meeting: 4/7
At the meeting: Bucci, Parent, Reeves, Sivilotti, Schoenberg, Soundarajan, Steele, Supowit, Teodorescu
- Prerequisites for admission to the BS-CSE major: Currently, most of the
other engineering programs require students to have completed Engineering
181, 183 before being admitted to their respective majors. We have not
required this of BS-CSE students partly because the material in
181-183 is not directly relevant to CSE majors and parly because we have
students who switch between the BS-CSE and BS-CIS programs. At the same
time, BS-CSE students are advised to finish these courses in their
freshman year and the vast majority of them do but a handful take it later
in their program, sometimes as late as in their senior year.
The faculty involved with Eng 181-183 have complained about such students,
especially senior students, since they tend, to quote, "have an attitude".
Hence the college has urged us to consider requiring that students complete
these courses before being admitted to the BS-CSE major (with suitable
accomodations being made for students who switch from BS-CIS to BS-CSE).
Since we are very close to switching to semesters, the idea would be to
do this as part of the transition (Eng 181-183 will become Eng 1181-1182)
so students will be required to finish Eng 1181, 1182 before being admitted
to the BS-CSE major.
After a brief discussion, the committee recommended this for approval to the
faculty. Neelam will ask for electronic approval via the faculty mailing
list.
- Rubric for assessment of technology teams: One of the
activities that we introduced, several years ago, into the capstone
courses requires students to explore a new tool, technology, or
process and write a three or four page paper on it. The purpose of
this activity was to further develop the lifelong learning abilities
of the student (as well as his or her written communication skills).
However, since the item in question may be unrelated to the student's
capstone project, it tends to distract from the main activity in the
course. In order to address this, some courses (CSE 786, 682) have
modified this activity as follows. Students are organized into
"technology teams" that are orthogonal to the project teams. That is,
each technology team is made up of one student from each of the
project teams (in the ideal case). Each technology team is charged with
researching a specific technology relevant to projects in the domain, for
e.g., "texture" (in graphics) or "sound" (in games). Each technology team
researches the topic carefully and makes an extended team presentation to
the class presenting their findings. Each student in a project team serves
as the "point person" for that project team in the particular technology
(texture or sound or whichever technology the tech team that he/she was
in was responsible for researching). The slides/other documents that the
team prepares for its presentation becomes available as a key resource
related to the particular topic, to all the project teams.
Given the nature of this activity, it is clear that it makes a strong
contribution to the lifelong learning outcome since each technology
team explores a particular topic in-depth and has to be able to
address questions that students (in any of the project teams) might
raise during the tech-team's presentation. At the same time, it also clearly
contributes to students' team-working skills as well as their communication
skills. Thus it seems appropriate to develop a new rubric that can be used
to assess various components of this activity. Neelam presented a
candidate rubric.
While the first three dimensions in the rubric seem reasonable, the
main concern that Rick (who devleops and teaches 682 regularly) had was
that the
last dimension is based on a faulty assumption; i.e., that the members
of a technology team will be available to all project teams
for consultations. That has not been the intent of the approach and it
would not work since students are already much too busy with the work
on their own project teams. Roger Crawfis (who developed and teaches
786 regularly) had a similar concern (although Roger could not attend the
UGSC meeting). Thus it would seem appropriate to drop this dimension
from the rubric. At the same time, it would seem reasonable to introduce
a new one that assesses the quality of the document produced by each
technology team and its effectiveness to help project teams answer
questions that they may have about the particular topic or to help them
locate useful relevant resources, etc. Neelam will prepare a revised
version of the rubric for use in these (and possibly the other) capstone
courses.
- Comment on our rubrics: Paul made a general point: in almost each
of our rubrics, we use four levels for each dimension in the rubric.
Informally, these levels may be characterized as corresponding to
"poor", "fair", "good", and "excellent" (or even "outstanding") achievement
with respect to the particular skill. In other words, there is an important
gap, in almost each dimension in each rubric, between level 3 and level
4 with
the former corresponding to "good" and the latter corresponding to
"excellent"/"outstanding". We need to expand the levels to five, with a
new level that would correspond to the informal level of "very good".
The general expectation/guideline would be that most students would get
a score of 3 ("good") or 4 ("very good") with almost no one getting a
1 ("poor") or 5 ("excellent"/"outstanding"). We will work on revising the
rubrics to implement this finer scale.
The meeting was adjourned at 12:10 pm.
Next meeting: ??
At the meeting: Bucci, Lai, Parent, Reeves, Sivilotti, Soundarajan, Supowit
- POCAT results: We discussed the results of the Winter '11 POCAT
(and compared them with the Au '10 results). The Winter '11 test included
some new/revised questions. The results were rather interesting (although
it should be noted that only 13 students took the test so the reliability
of the results might be somewhat questionable). A detailed summary and
possible actions appear at
evaluation page (login required; contact Neelam).
One overall change that was briefly considered was to move the test on-line
and
collect some additional information for inclusion in the summary results,
information such as the identity of the instructors involved in teaching
the sections of the courses that the particular students took the courses
with to enable us to identify possible strengths and weaknesses in
approaches used by the different instructors in their courses.
The meeting was adjourned at 12:15 pm.
Next meeting: ??
At the meeting: Bucci, Lai, Parent, Reeves, Sivilotti, Schoenberg, Soundarajan, Steele, Teodorescu
- Undergraduate forum: The annual undergraduate forum was held on
Thursday, Feb. 3. It was well-attended (about 30 students ranging from
freshmen to seniors; seven faculty; two alums; two members of the
advising staff; two people from the SOC lab). A report summarizing the
discussion at the forum is
available. We discussed some
of the main points:
- Transition to semesters: There seems to be a lot of interest (and
some anxiety) among students about the impact on them of the switch
to semesters. We had planned on having advising sessions starting in
the fall quarter to help students who will be here during the transition
to plan their programs. After discussing the comments/questions that we
heard at the forum, we decided it would be useful to have sessions
starting in the Spring Quarter. Peg and Neelam will work on this.
Hardcopies of the proposed semester programs and the transition plans
(available at
http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/ugrad/programs/semconv/) were passed out.
There
was a question whether the reduction in the number of terms (from 3 to 2)
that most students would be registering for and the resulting cost
savings would be passed on to students in the form of reduced tuition and
fees. Neelam raised this question at the College of Engineering's Semester
Task Force meeting; the response was that it is unlikely that tuition and
fees would go down, given the likelihood of reduced state support, but it
is hoped that the increase in tuition/fees will be somewhat moderated.
- Courses: There were a few comments about some specific courses:
- CSE 221: Some students complained that they spent a lot of time
figuring out some compiler errors they got and felt that, given the
relatively simple nature of the underlying problem (once they figured
it out) that was the source of the errors, it should not have been
so difficult to figure it out. Paolo noted that most such problems
are addressed in the FAQ (see:
http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/sce/rcpp/FAQ/index.html, in particular the
link to "compile-time errors" in that page); but also noted that
many students don't read the information in these pages. We will see
if there are other ways of presenting the information that will better
serve the students.
- CSE 551: There was a comment that this quarter's offering of
CSE 551 has been spending a lot of time on security issues that are
specific to the Mobile-Windows-platform, possibly at the expense of
discussion of underlying concepts. The comment has been passed on to
Dong Xuan who teaches the course.
- CSE 652: Several students commented very positively about this
course.
- Accreditation of BS-CSE program: Several of the students at the forum
were aware of the accreditation status of the BS-CSE program and were
interested in some of the details such as POCAT which we use as one of
the key mechanisms for assessing the extent to which (some of) the outcomes
are achieved. We discussed some of these details. Hardcopies of the
current program objectives and outcomes (based, in part, on discussions
at earlier forums) were passed out.
The meeting was adjourned at 12 noon.
Next meeting: ??
At the meeting: Bucci, Lai, Parent, Reeves, Sivilotti, Schoenberg, Soundarajan, Steele, Supowit
- Annual forum: The annual forum (for all CSE and CSE majors/pre-majors)
will be held on Thursday, Feb. 3. Several members of UGSC will attend.
Peg and Neelam will talk to others about attending. The forum will be
on 2/3 in DL 480 at 5:30. Pizza/pop will be served.
- POCAT: Our plan is to create a bank of questions for use in POCAT with
at least one question for each "mastery/competence" level outcome in
each required and popular elective course. Progress on this has been slow.
Neelam will work with faculty to generate more questions for more courses.
- Updating outcomes in course syllabi: We recently revised the course
outcomes terminology to use four levels of outcomes (mastery/ competence/
familiarity/ exposure) instead of the current three levels (mastery/
familiarity/ exposure) because, for many courses, "mastery" was too strong
a claim for many outcomes but "familiarity" was too weak. The course
syllabi have to be revised to reflect this. But, given all the activity
with the conversion to semesters, we have not done this. Undergrad
Studies and the Curriculum Comm. will work on this.
- Assessment/evaluation: We had a session on Monday, Jan. 10, where
Tom Bihari, Rick Parent, and Kitty Reeves discussed results from their
courses (respectively CSE 758, 682, 601) of using various rubrics for
evaluating various activities. Neelam is preparing a summary. These
summaries will become part of our evaluation documentation.
The meeting was adjourned at 12:00 noon.
Next meeting: ??
At the meeting: Bucci, Lai, Parent, Sivilotti, Soundarajan, Steele, Supowit, Teodorescu
- Accreditation preparations: Neelam updated the committee on preparations
for the upcoming accreditation evaluation of the BS-CSE program. The main
tasks this quarter are continuing collection of materials from various
courses, (some) reorganization of the assessment/evaluation information,
and working on the self-study. With respect to the first item, the plan
is to create an on-line archive of all the materials. (For access
information, please email neelam). With respect to the second item, one
important task is going to be reorganize the way that assessment data
from the rubrics used in 601 and the capstone design courses are collected
and presented as well as the evaluation of that data. There will be a
meeting on Monday, Jan. 10, at 3:30 in DL 298 where Rick will present
information from CSE 682, and Kitty will talk about CSE 601. The plan is
also to get Tom Bihari to talk about CSE 758. With respect to the third
item, Neelam mentioned two points: First, the CAC portion of the self-study
has been considerably simplified so that it just contains a table that
shows how the CAC curricular requirements are met; so the self-study will
consist of the EAC portion plus the CAC-table. Second, and on the flip side,
since we are switching to semesters soon after the evaluation, we will have
to include fairly complete information about the planned semester program.
- Note added after meeting: Since Eric is on sabbatical during the Winter
and Spring, Neelam requested Paul to join the committee and Paul has kindly
agreed. Thanks to Paul!
The meeting was adjourned at 12 noon.
Next meeting: Jan. 11
At the meeting: Fosler, Lai, Parent, Soundarajan, Teodorescu
- Accreditation preparations: The discussion focused on how to effectively
evaluate the assessment results of the professional and societal issues
outcomes (such as teamwork skills, communication skills, lifelong
abilities, etc.) that students achieve by engaging in certain activities
in the capstone design courses and in 601. Student performance in these
activities is assessed using a number of suitable rubrics. The key
questions were how to evaluate these assessment results and how to
share these results among faculty so that the lessons learned can
be used to effect improvements in all the courses.
It was decided that we will organize two sessions each year, perhaps
early in the fall quarter or perhaps one early in the fall and one early
in the winter quarter. It was proposed that the sessions be organized on
Mondays at 3:30 on a day when there isn't a faculty meeting or an outside
speaker so all interested faculty will be able to attend. In a session,
we will have faculty from three or four of 601 plus the capstone design
courses to discuss their recent experiences with their courses. But a key
point was (for UGSC, in consultation with the 601 and the capstone course
faculty,) to come up with three or four specific questions that the
discussions would be structured around. These questions would focus on the
professional skills and societal issues outcomes and may target specific
dimensions that appear in the rubrics. An example might be, "what is the
most common problem that individual students seem to have in taking
responsibility for assigned tasks in a team project and how can we help
address this?" Having a focused discussion that is based on questions
that are related to specific items that appear in the rubrics, given that
the rubrics are used in all the courses, would seem to meet the goals
listed in the paragraph above.
(Additional note: A better approach may be to create a question
corresponding to each dimension in each rubric; and have the instructor/
coordinator for a given course to pick the three questions most relevant
to the particular course and focus on those three questions during the
discussion about that course. This would seem better since the issues
deemed most important may vary from course to course; and it would allow
the discussions, over a period of several quarters or a couple of
years, to cover all or most of the important components of the
professional skills and societal issues outcomes.)
It was decided we will try this early in the winter quarter with the
first session to be on Monday, January 10th, at 3:30. Rick volunteered
to talk about 682. We will identify a couple of other faculty who can
talk about their respective courses (possibly courses that have been
this quarter (Au '10).
- POCAT results: We didn't have time to discuss this. We will, instead,
merge it with the discussion of the Winter POCAT results. One key point
was noted: we need to get faculty to create suitable questions related to
specific outcomes listed in the respective course syllabi.
Neelam will contact faculty about this.
The meeting was adjourned at 11:30
Next meeting: ??
At the meeting: Bucci, Fosler, Parent, Reeves, Rodriguez, Soundarajan, Steele, Supowit
- Enrollment management: A recent message from the dean indicated that
OSU has a goal of incresing student enrollment substantially and that
the College of Engineering is expected to contribute in a major way to
that. This means that plans for restricting the admission of students
to particular majors (such as CSE or CIS) are being strongly discouraged.
At the same time, the dean's message indicated that resources will be made
available to departments based on the number of credit hours that they
teach. The dean also asked us (as well as other programs) to provide him
such information
as the number of students in the major, which courses we have enrollment
problems with, etc., as well as what additional resources we need, etc.
We discussed some of these issues. Our enrollment figures appear in the
table below. So far we have been able to accomodate all students in
nearly all of the courses but most courses are running near their capacity.
So if enrollment keeps increasing (as expected), we will have to start
closing students out of courses (both required and elective) unless we
are able to hire additional faculty, GTAs etc.
Year Majors Pre-majors NFQF Degrees granted
CSE CIS CSE CIS CSE CIS CSE CIS
2001 322 214 459 406 207 ?? 87 86
2002 288 180 378 333 151 ?? 107 69
2003 280 216 295 199 106 ?? 114 77
2004 274 110 253 186 97 ?? 98 41
2005 265 113 227 177 82 ?? 88 50
2006 267 112 225 174 87 ?? 82 43
2007 246 125 261 173 102 ?? 96 35
2008 282 132 261 181 116 ?? 87 52
2009 302 149 259 157 87 ?? 84 39
Neelam will prepare a summary to give to Xiaodong so he can respond to the
dean's request.
- CIS minor: The AI faculty have discussed the possibility of creating
a version of the intro-AI course (5533) that would be accessible
as an elective course to
CIS minor students (after Foundations I). In addition, Systems I will also
be accessible to the minor students; as well as Foundations II (for those who follow
one of the proposed three tracks).
Thus the minor program, as
proposed, is viable.
Conceivably, with some minor tweaking
in the prerequisite, other courses will become accessible to all the
minor students. In any case, since it is already viable, we will submit
this program and continue working on making additional courses
accessible to these students.
- Discrete math course: In the switch to semesters, the plan is to
absorb (some of) the material in Math 366 into the Foundations I course.
CSE majors will be required to take an additional discrete math course;
CIS majors will be required to take either that course or a linear
algebra course. Math dept. has asked us what we would like to see included
in the new discrete math course. The following points were noted:
- The
topics currently in Math 366 are going to be treated in the first
four weeks of the Foundations I course.
- Math 366 and Math 566 use a
common book, "Discrete math with applications" by Epp
(table of contents).
- The current syllabuses for the two courses are available from
http://www.math.ohio-state.edu/courses/homepages.html
- The main topic of Math 366 currently seems to be logic, proofs,
functions, relations, etc. Chapters 3, 4, 5, 6; and 7, and a bit of 8.
- The main topics of 566 seem to be recursion, big-Oh notation,
graphs and trees and the like, counting etc.
- Currently Math 566 is a prereq for CSE 680. In the semester
version, the discrete math course, so far, is not a prereq for anything.
- Some faculty have argued that the new discrete
math course should be mainly a combinatorics course, similar to the
current Math 575 course (syllabus in the same place); others
have argued this would be too much for most of our students.
Moreover, given that only 4 weeks of Foundations I will deal with the
topics currently in 366, we need to make sure that the remaining
topics are not forgotten.
We will continue the discussion at the next meeting.
Added on 11/29: The discussion about the discrete math course continued
electronically and at a brief meeting on 11/23. Based on the above and
these discussions, it was decided to recommend to faculty that
the new discrete math course be a
combination of the portion of 366 that is not included in Foundations I
and 566 and that the
course be a prereq for Foundations II, in the same way that 566
is currently a prereq for 680. This would also require us to modify the
BS-CIS program to require this course (rather than require either the
discrete math course or the linear algebra course; if the discrete math
course is required, these students can take linear algebra as a tech
elective). This will be discussed at a faculty meeting on 11/30.
The meeting was adjourned at 11:30.
Next meeting: 11/23
At the meeting: Bucci, Fosler, Parent, Reeves, Rodriguez, Soundarajan, Steele, Supowit, Teodorescu
- "GET program": Syracuse University has a program called
Global Enterprise Technology (GET) that is supported by a number of industry partners and is intended
to prepare students in various aspects of global enterprise technology
systems. Syracuse students get between 9 and 15 (semester) credits for
successfully completing the program.
Rajiv has been interacting with them (and with JP Morgan Chase,
Nationwide etc.)
to see if a similar program can be set up here. This seems difficult
for now given the transition to semesters. At the same time, there is
interest in making the program available to current students and the
industries involved would also like to have our students involved.
A number of our students have also expressed strong interest in
participating. Rajiv has worked out an arrangement with the Registrar's
office to take care of tuition issues etc. for students who wish to
participate in the program.
On the OSU side, students will register for some number of hours of
693 credit with Rajiv and Rajiv will interact with the Syracuse faculty
to keep track of students' progress.
The main question for the committee was how to allow our students to get
academic credit for the program and count the credits as part of their
major. Since we do not have equivalent courses, transfer credit will not
work. After a brief discussion, the committee agreed that given
the many benefits that students will acquire by participating in the
program, it
would be appropriate to allow both BS-CIS and BS-CSE majors who participate
in the program to count up to
nine hours of 693 credits from this program toward their tech electives.
- POCAT results: We discussed the results of this quarter's POCAT
(available here).
Student performance on some of the questions was surprisingly poor. For
example, the first question that is really just about how numbers are
encoded in binary (although it is phrased in terms of the number of states
of a finite state machine) seems quite simple and yet only 36% of the
students answered it correctly. Several of the other questions also had
relatively poor performance and we will try to identify the reasons.
One possibility is that the wording of the questions is poor. We will
continue the discussion at the next meeting.
- CIS Minor: There was no time to discuss this. But in the Curriculum
Committee meeting that preceded the UGSC meeting, Chris Brew presented
some details of a proposed "AI-lite" course that might be accessible to
these students as an elective. The graphics faculty are also considering
the possibility of a course similar to the current 581 that might be
accessible to these students.
The meeting was adjourned at 11:30.
Next meeting: Nov. 18
At the meeting: Bucci, Fosler, Parent, Reeves, Soundarajan, Steele, Supowit, Teodorescu
- CIS Minor:
We continued discussion of the
proposed Minor program
and the problem of lack of elective courses that the students can take.
One thing we (just) noted was that the Foundations I course lists, as
prereqs, one of 1232, 1233, or Software I (and, in the case of Software
I, a co-req of Software II). 1232 is the second C++ course (for
non-majors), 1233 the second Java course (also for non-majors). This makes
Foundations I accessible to all the minor students (and is, indeed,
included as a required course in the proposal). In addition, 3241 (the
database course, replacement for 670) has prereqs of Software II and
Foundations I; if the first of those can be replaced by "one of
1232, or 1233, or Software II" (which seems reasonable, given that
Foundations I will also be required), that course will become accessible.
Similarly, 2421 (Systems I, replacement for 360+) has prereqs of
Software II and Foundations I; again, if the first of those can be
replaced by "one of 1232, or 1233, or Software II", that would become
accessible. Foundations II is similar although it has Stats I as another
prereq so it would be accessible (after changes similar to the above)
for some of the minor students.
Two other possibilities were discussed.
Currently CSE 581 is accessible to minor students. No equivalent course
has been proposed for semesters. Instead, 3902, the project course on
designing interactive systems, is intended for students interested in
the topic. But this course has a number of prereqs (Software II,
Foundations II, Systems I) making it inaccessible to minor students.
Rick Parent seemed to think it might be worth considering the possibility
of developing a 581-like course (with an exclusion cluase with 3902).
Finally, currently CSE 630 is accessible to minor students. The first AI
course under semesters has Foundations II as prereq. This course may
become accessible to (some) minors if the change considered above in the
prereqs for Foundations II is made.
We plan (hope?) to arrive at a conclusion at the next meeting.
- Preparation for accreditation evaluation: Neelam summarized the
three major activities that we have to go through this year: collecting
course materials from all (BS-CSE) required courses, all capstone
design courses, and a number of the popular electives; preparing the
self-study; make sure that the documentation of our assessment and
evaluation activities is in good shape. The work on the first item is
proceeding. The work on the second item will start next quarter.
We need to tweak our work on the third item; we will continue this
discussion next week.
The meeting was adjourned at 11:30
Next meeting: 11/4
At the meeting: Baith, Bucci, Fosler, Rodriguez, Soundarajan, Steele, Teodorescu
- BS-CIS Minor program: We continued discussion of the
proposed Minor program (with the addition of a 1-credit language course to tracks B and C),
in particular the issues raised at the last meeting, i.e., the lack of
CSE courses that students might be able to take as electives, especially
students in tracks B and C. This seems to be a severe enough problem that
unless we can solve it, it may not make much sense to even offer a minor.
One possible solution would be to change the prereqs for some of the
advanced courses so that they don't require SW II, Foundations I, etc.
as they seem to now. The disadvantage of such an approach would be that it
may have a negative impact on the major programs.
We will continue the discussion at the next meeting.
- Accreditation preparations: Again we did not get to this. We will do
so at the next meeting.
The meeting was adjourned at 11:30.
Next meeting: 10/28
At the meeting: Baith, Bucci, Fosler, Parent, Reeves, Rodriguez, Soundarajan, Steele.
- BA-CIS program: We continued discussion of the proposed BA program
and possible variations. Taking various issues into account, the
following program was considered:
BA-CIS proposal:
Gen Ed (liberal arts) 36 hrs
Math & sc. 27 hrs
(Calc. I, II; Stats;
Phys sc; Bio sc;
Additional math/sc)
CSE core: 20 hrs
(SW I, II; Fnds. I;
Sys I; Prof. & ethics;
Project)
Related field core: 12 hrs
(Intro-level: 3-6
Advanced: 6-9)
Program Electives: 27 hrs
(CSE courses: >= 13 hrs
Related field >= 6 hrs
+other related
courses)
-------------
Total: 122 hrs
Limits: CSE: minimum: 33 hrs; max: 41 hrs;
Related field: min: 18 hrs; max: 26 hrs.
The idea of requiring 13 hrs of CSE courses in the electives was to
allow the inclusion of a 4-credit course (especially, a capstone design
course). The "other related courses" are intended to mean courses that
may not necessarily be from the related field but
could be courses from other areas as long
as there is a reasonable connection to the related field and/or the
application of computing to the related field.
After a brief further discussion, this proposal was approved. Neelam will
send mail to faculty asking for approval.
- Minor program: We continued discussion of the
proposed Minor program (with the addition of a 1-credit language course to tracks B and C).
One concern was that a student following track B or track C might then
take SW I as an elective (since the exclusions currently proposed for SW I
do not disallow this). This is clearly not intended since it would be
similar to a student in the quarter system taking 214 and then 221/222.
We can address this either by adding the exclusions to the SW I syllabus
(and adding other appropriate exclusions in other courses) or revising
the Minor program proposal. The former seems preferable since the same
consideration applies whether or not a student is following the Minor.
A more serious concern had to do with the electives. According to the
proposal, students are required to take 6 hours of electives but if they
follow track B or C, very few courses would be available to
them, given the prerequisites. We will discuss this further in the next
meeting.
- Accreditation preparations: We didn't get to this topic.
The meeting was adjourned at 11:25 am.
Next meeting: 10/21
At the meeting: Bucci, Fosler, Parent, Reeves, Rodriguez, Soundarajan, Steele, Teodorescu, Xuan.
- BA-CIS program: We discussed the
proposed BA program.
The proposed CS core, consisting of Software I & II, Foundations I,
Systems I, project course, professionalism/ethics course, and additional
programming language (1 cr hour) course seemed reasonable exept for the
last item which, it was felt, would be better as an elective since
students are already going to be working with Java, C, and assembly
language in the other required courses.
The more important concern was about the "related field". The current
BA program specifies a structure for the set of courses students should
take (5 hours of introductory course, 10 hours of advanced course, rest
being electives). This structure seems to be valuable and it was felt
that we should impose a similar structure on the semester version. Neelam
will revise the proposal accordingly and we will discuss it at the next
meeting.
- CIS Minor program: We discussed the
proposed minor program.
Overall the proposal seemed reasonable. One suggestion was to add, to
tracks B and C, a requirement of one of the 1-cr hour programming language
courses. This would make the required number of hours in each track to be
7 cr hours; and would ensure that students in each track see more than one
programming language. This would also increase the total number of credit
hours for the minor to 17 hours in each track, compared with, in the
above proposal, 17 hours in track A and 16 in the other two tracks. The
uniformity in the number of hours and the fact that this change would
ensure that students in all tracks will see more than one prog. lang.
seemed desirable. We will discuss this further in the next meeting.
- Accreditation preparations: We didn't get to this topic.
The meeting was adjourned at 11:25.
Next meeting: 10/14.
At the meeting: Baith, Bucci, Lai, Parent, Reeves, Rodriguez, Soundarajan, Steele, Teodorescu.
- Student reps: The student representatives, Cody Baith (BS-CIS) and
Alex Rodriguez (BS-CSE) introduced themselves and were welcomed to the committee.
- BS-CIS program: We discussed a proposal for the
semester version of the BS-CIS program; page 8 summarizes the proposed program.
The proposal is very similar to the proposed semester
version of the
BS-CSE program.
One change was suggested: adding a condition to the 15 hours of tech
electives to require that at least 8 of those hours be CSE courses.
This would parallel a corresponding condition in the BS-CSE proposal.
The committee unanimously approved the proposal, with the above condition,
and recommended it to faculty for its approval.
- BA-CIS: We also discussed ideas for the semester version of the
BA-CIS program. Ken expressed some concern that we may want to consider
dropping this program altogether since its CSE portion is too weak.
On the other hand, as several others noted, it serves an important role
and caters to students whose primary interest is application of computing
to other fields rather than working in, say, a software firm such as
Google or Microsoft. Although our minor program will suit some of these
students, the BA-CIS program provides a more solid background in CS topics.
Currently the BA program includes 86 (quarter) hours in the major
consisting of 25 hours of core courses (CSE 221, 222, 321, 360, 560, 601,
670); 19 hours of CSE electives; and 42 hours of additional major hours
consisting of Math 152, 153, 366, Stat 245, CSE 459, related
field (15 hrs), additional electives (8 hrs). In addition, 5 hours
of Math 151 is included in the GEC category. This translates to about
60 semester hours. We considered the following proposal:
- Software I, II; Foundations I; Systems I: 15 hrs;
- Project; Professionalism and ethics: 5 hrs;
- Calculus I, II; Stats (?): 13 hrs;
- Related field: 10 hrs;
- Electives: 18 hrs of which at least 12 must be CSE courses.
The last category was not entirely clear; in particular whether it
should be 18 or fewer and
how many of those should be CSE courses; with 18 hours, the total
in the major would be 61 hours.
We will continue this discussion at the next meeting.
- Accreditation preparations: Will get to this at the next meeting.
The meeting was adjourned at 11:30.
Next meeting: Oct. 7