Spring: | Feb. 14; |
Fall: | Nov. 25; |
After extended discussion (over two sessions!), we agreed on the following:
The meeting was adjourned at 2:00 pm.
Next meeting: ??
The current CPHR (cumulative point hour ratio) for admission to the majors is 2.5 (over a minimum of 15 cr hours at OSU); until January '13, it was 2.0. Thus the figure of 319 admits is over a period when the requirement was 2.0 for about the half the time and 2.5 for the other half. The requirement is slated to increase to 3.0 effective Summer '14.
We will revisit this early next semester, when we will have additional data from Autumn '13, to see if a further increase in the CPHR requirement is called for. If such an increase is approved, it will go into effect in Summer of 2015. It was also noted that an increase in the tenure-track faculty size has little impact on our ability to offer undergraduate classes, especially in the short term; instead, it is the full-time lecturers, especially senior lecturers, who are teaching a major portion of our undergraduate classes.
There were no specific comments about CSE courses under semesters; the transition of most courses seem to have been smooth. But there were serious concerns about the new ECE courses, ECE 2000 and 2100. The first two-thirds of ECE 2000 concerns digital logic and that portion of the course seems to work well. The last third of ECE 2000 and the first half of ECE 2100 deal with signal processing. The second half of ECE 2100 concerns analog circuits and that seems to work reasonably as well. It is the last third of ECE 2000 and the first half of 2100, the portions dealing with signal processing, that are very problematic. The lectures seem to present the material as essentially exercises in applied calculus with almost no physical explanation or insight; and the GTAs are of almost no help. The "labs" don't help either since they seem to be organized mostly as mechanical activities ("push this button", "watch that video") and don't help students develop conceptual understanding of the topic.
One possible reason for this problem is that the same courses are used for both ECE and CSE students; while the material, as it is taught, may make sense to ECE students (or it may provide them background which will be built on later in their curricula), an alternative approach might be much preferable for CSE students. One possiblity might be to come up with a version of the sequence meant for CSE students that omits the signal processing component while expanding the digital logic and/or analog circuit portions.
We will work with the ECE faculty to see if we can address this problem.
The meeting was adjourned at 12:40.
Next meeting: ??