Spring: | Feb 26; Feb 12; |
Autumn: | Nov 9; Sept 28; Sept 14; Sept 7; |
Neelam will ask for (email) approval by the regular faculty of the proposed changes. (A marked-up document showing the changes is available here.)
Next meeting: ??
The meeting was adjourned at 11:10 am.
Next meeting: ??
A different question had to do with the fractional scores (such as 3.52) that some students received on some dimensions. One would expect, in using a rubric, that each student would receive a score such as 3 or 4 or possibly 3.5 but something like 3.52 seems rather strange. After the meeting, Neelam contacted Michelle by email and she clarified that she uses her own scoring method to score the papers and, for the purposes of the rubric, converted those scores to a 4-point scale; hence the fractional values. We will have to discuss whether this is a suitable approach or whether it would be better to use the rubric results from a section in which the instructor uses the rubric directly.
There was another question, this one concerning the adequacy of the rubric, with
respect to assessing the papers. While it addresses the ethical and professional
issues as well as societal implications, a common problem that many students,
including our majors, face when presenting a point of view is their failure to
know the difference between stating an opinion on the one hand versus presenting
a cogent, logical argument on the other. The dimension, "Presentation of ideas and
organization of the paper", addresses this but to a very limited extent and in an
unclear manner, focusing primarily on the information presented in the paper.
Al Cline mentioned that, when he teaches 2501, he gives students clear, written
guidance on the paper, including the importance of presenting a logical argument,
grounded in relevant ethical theories. We will work on revising the rubric
to include a dimension that addresses this.
(Since then, Neelam has worked on revising the rubric; a draft of this revised
version is available
here. The changes are all in the "Presentation of ideas" dimension. Comments are welcome.)
There were a number of comments. Overall, the capstone project teams' performance seems satisfactory. The results in the two dimensions related to team effectiveness seem very good, even better than we might have expected, given the common refrain that our students do not seem to be effective team players; on the other hand, these scores are based on performance in the final poster session and, as was mentioned, teams tend to put their best foot forward in such settings. A different point that was noted had to do with the scores in the dimension related to "other factors". The scores for some of the teams, the ones in 5914 (in which each team works on a project that uses the Watson system to solve some suitable problem), were rather low. This seemed to be because these teams, given the nature of the course and the project they were expected to work on, did not consider the possibility of using various professional tools. Thus the problem here seems related to the rubric dimension, rather than to the performance of the teams. We will explore revising the rubric to address this. For example, it may be appropriate to have an alternative dimension that would be suitable for the Watson-based course that addresses similar outcomes as the existing dimension. This may be also relevant for CSE 5913, the capstone course on animation that Huamin plans to teach in the spring since all student teams in that course are expected to use a specific tool, Maya, in their projects. [Note: After the minutes were posted, Roger Crawfis who teaches 5912 regularly (and who could not attend the UGSC meeting), noted the following: "I find the teamwork of our students not just satisfactory, but exceptional. Yes, there may occasionally be a dysfunctional team, but I find this rare and frankly, more often in other disciplines. I fear this is a historical statement that is perhaps constantly being perpetuated. Not sure if CSE 5912 is a weird exception to this or I somehow get them to cooperate, but I doubt it. With the 390x and perhaps other factors, let's take the time to praise our students and take pride that the evaluators noticed this."
Another important point that was noted was that having each of the people who completes the evaluation to evaluate 8-10 projects each may be a bad idea since this doesn't allow the evaluator to spend sufficient time with each project to do a sufficiently careful evaluation. On the other hand, the idea of having only capstone course instructors perform these evaluations given that they have an in-depth understanding of the nature of these courses, seems reasonable. A possible compromise would seem to be to do a sampling of the posters rather than try to get each poster evaluated. In other words, each evaluator would be asked to evaluate, say, 3 posters which means that we will have evaluations of fifteen to twenty posters (rather than all forty or so posters at the Spring session). We will make a decision on this before the fall poster session (in December).
The meeting was adjourned at 11:10
Next meeting: ??
Although the new procedures seem to have worked as far as enrolling the right students into the classes, the advisors in the Advising Office have had to put in a lot of effort to get it done. This is especially problematic towards the deadline of the second Friday of the semester because many faculty have sent in their enrollment permissions on that day, some times late on that day, putting considerable pressure on the advisors. To avoid this as well as to address other problems that might come up, Rafe will revise the message he sends out to include more precise instructions for faculty to follow. All faculty are urged to follow the instructions carefully so students, especially CSE/CIS majors, are able to enroll in the courses they need.
Gagan Agrawal and Neelam met some of the ECE faculty about this. There seemed to be various ways to address this but the most popular one seemed to be to have ECE offer two versions of the course, one for CSE majors and the other for ECE majors with latter including Phys 1251 as a pre-req and the former tweaked to be not only more accessible to CSE majors but also more interesting (by possibly including such things as the use of software packages to analyze circuits). The flip side is that there may be some concern among some ECE faculty about the impact on their ability to staff the two distinct versions of the course; at the same time, given the 200+ students CSE students (and a similar number of ECE students) who take the course each year, this should, hopefully, be manageable. We will try to get this option implemented.
There was no time to discuss any of the other items in the agenda. They will be taken up in a later meeting.
The meeting was adjourned at 11:10.
Next meeting: 9/14/'17