Report on Undergraduate Forum of March 24, 2015

The CSE Undergraduate Studies Committee (UGSC) organized the annual undergraduate forum on March 24, 2015 in BE 198. The forum started at about 5:30 pm and continued till about 7:00 pm, with most students staying on till near the end. The summary below tries to describe the main points that were made during the discussions. The summary is based on notes made by Dr. Paolo Bucci; many thanks to Paolo for taking detailed notes!

Students:

Danish, Evan, sophomore

Dhamija, Akhil, junior

Ebright, Robert, transfer

Gainer, Glen, senior

Gratz, Daniel, junior

Harriger, Amber, sophomore

Johnson, Joel, sophomore

Johnston, Michael, sophomore

Krumel, Ariane, junior

Lee, Sarah, senior

Ling, Ziman

Maguire, Maxwell

Maher, Owen, sophomore

Meredith, Daniel, sophomore

Metz, Kurt, freshman

Miller, Lucas, sophomore

Schuller, Zachary, junior

Schulz, Michael, sophomore

Suhr, Alane, junior

Sustar, Jason, senior

Swisher, Matthew, senior

Taylor, Timothy, junior

Vasudevan, Ritvik, junior

Yang, Xuan, freshman

Yang, Zhiyue, junior

Zhang, Te, junior

Faculty: Matthew Boggus, Paolo Bucci, Doreen Close, Jeffrey Jones, Jeremy Morris, Neelam Soundarajan, Paolo Sivilotti, Xiaodong Zhang.

Advising staff: Leslie Dowler, Chelsea Norris, Nikki Strader.

Systems staff: David Kneisly, Shaun Rowland.

1. Everyone in the room briefly introduced themselves.

2. Xiaodong Zhang gave a brief presentation about the history and current state of computer science education, especially the fact that computing ideas are becoming central to so many different disciplines.

3. Neelam wrote down a bunch of possible topics to discuss during the forum and asked if there were any suggestions for additions. (There was one: research opportunities; it is briefly addressed below.)

4. Changes to undergrad programs: Neelam summarized ideas for three sets of changes that have been discussed by the Undergrad Studies Committee and the CSE faculty:
   • Changes in ECE courses: Currently CSE majors take ECE 2000, 2100 (4 credit hours each); CIS majors take ECE 2000 (4 cr hrs). Students have reported that the last third of ECE 2000 and the first third of ECE 2100 don't seem at all relevant to CSE/CIS majors. The ECE Dept. has also received some negative feedback from ECE majors about these courses. Based on this, the ECE faculty have proposed replacing these courses with three new courses, the two relevant for our majors being ECE 2060 (digital logic) and ECE 2020 (analog circuits), each being 3 credit hours. The plan is to require CIS majors to take ECE 2060 in place of ECE 2000; to require CSE majors to take ECE 2020 and 2060 in place of ECE 2000, 2100; and to move the extra hours (1 cr hr in the case of the CIS program and 2 in the case of the CSE program) to the tech elective requirements. This change should be going into effect as soon as the university approvals are received which is expected to be soon.

   • CSE 2501, Phil 1337: CSE majors are required, this being a requirement for all engineering students, to take a GE course on ethics. Many CSE majors take Phil 1337, Ethics of Computing, to meet this requirement. The problem is that there is considerable overlap between Phil 1337 and CSE 2501 which is required of all CSE (and CIS) majors. But there is one important component of CSE 2501 that Phil 1337 does not include, i.e., oral presentations by students. The Philosophy Dept. is keen on addressing this problem and has offered to design a richer course (4 cr hrs) that would include oral presentations. Assuming they are able to do that --their current plan is to offer a first version of this course in Spring '16-- CSE (or CIS) majors who take this version of the Philosophy course would not have to take CSE 2501.

   • Tech elective options: Under the quarter system, CSE and CIS majors used to have a select a tech elective option from one of several specified options such as, software systems, information systems, information and computation assurance, etc. Each of these had a specified set of "required" courses (that had to be included among the tech elective hours of the student pursuing the particular option) and a set of recommended courses. Students could also choose the "individualized option" that allowed them to tailor their own option, in consultation with the advisor. The advantage of this was that the student's transcript indicated which option the student had completed, making it easy for employers and others to get valuable information quickly; second, it enabled students interested in a particular area such as information assurance to quickly identify the most relevant courses for that area.

     When we switched to semesters, we did not include the idea of tech elective options. Over the last couple of years, students, faculty, and the Advising Office have heard feedback that suggests it would be very useful to reintroduce the tech elective options. We do have a set of focus areas that list relevant courses for a number of areas but this is not formalized in any way. In their discussions, the Undergrad Studies Committee and the faculty have agreed that we should indeed create a set of tech elective options based on the ones under quarters and using the courses listed in the corresponding focus areas. We intend to send such a proposal to the College of Engineering (for the CSE program) and the College of Arts and Science (for the CIS program) shortly.

   • The students at the forum were generally in favor of all of these changes.

   • There was a comment/suggestion about interdisciplinary minors. Given the increasing applicability of computing ideas to various disciplines, both CSE and CIS majors are urged to consider the possibility of completing a minor in a field that has the potential for such application. And, in such cases, the student will need to complete only 8 hours of tech electives, instead of the usual 15 hrs; in other words, the minor, in effect, being treated as equivalent to 7 hrs of tech electives. Students who are interested in doing this should talk to the Advising Office and/or their faculty advisor to make sure that the particular minors they have in mind would qualify for this.

5. There were a number of questions/comments about courses:
   • Why are so few courses offered in the evening?: It is true that not every course is offered in the evening but "few" is probably not a reasonable characterization. For example, in Sp '15, sections of each of the following was offered in the evening: CSE 2221, 2321, 2421, 2431 (at 3:55-5:15pm), 2501 (also at 3:55-5:15), 3231, 3232, 3901, 3902, 4471, 5351 (at 3:55-5:15pm), and 5911. In any case, we will continue to try and offer evening sections of as many courses as possible depending on the availability of faculty.
   • Some courses are not offered frequently enough: One specific course that was mentioned was CSE 5914; a new version of this course (using IBM's Watson system) was offered in Au '14 but it won't be offered in Au '15.
     With the enormous demand for CSE courses from both majors and non-majors and the size of the faculty involved with teaching, especially, undergrad courses being rather limited, we have had to perform a careful balancing act, trying to ensure that the courses that are in high demand are offered as frequently as possible. As far as the (new version) of 5914 is concerned, we do hope to offer it in Sp '15.
   • CSE 2221, 2231: There was a complaint from a transfer student that although transfer students often have already completed several relatively advanced courses at their original school, they are required to take CSE 2221, 2231 "because they have not learned the components developed at OSU and used in these courses". Paolo Bucci (the coordinator for these courses) noted several points in response. First, transfer students are not denied transfer credit for these courses simply because they had not learned our components; indeed, only about three weeks of 2221 are spent on discussing these components so that is not a major part of 2221/2231. But if a student were to take 2231 without taking 2221 and is unfamiliar not just with our components, but also with the way they are designed and documented, it would be very difficult to pick them up as you go while also understanding the new 2231 material. Moreover, these courses are mainly about ensuring that students get a thorough understanding of good software development principles and practices which is necessary both in later courses as well as in professional practice. The components used in the courses reflect such good software development principles and practices and, from a pedagogical point of view, are better suited than standard ones to teaching these courses. Nevertheless, there may indeed be a problem for some transfer students who have, in fact, taken a number of courses at their previous school and have, in fact, developed this understanding; we do need to try to come up with ways of treating these students so that they are able to complete the program as quickly as possible but without running the risk of setting them up failure. The Undergrad Studies Comm. will work on this to develop possible answers.
   • Version control: A graduating senior mentioned that many students in teams in the junior project course don't seem to be aware of the advantages and importance of using standard version control systems in such projects and waste a lot of time and effort exchanging code via email messages etc. Paul Sivilotti, coordinator for CSE 3901, noted that students in both CSE 3901 and 3902 are now required to use version control (using Git); in addition, there is also some discussion of this in CSE 2231.
   • Disputes in project teams: A somewhat related question concerned disputes among memebers in project teams in courses. Unlike version control, though, there is no technical solution to this problem. In one respect, such experiences prepare the student for their careers since such disputes are not uncommon in actual practice. On the other hand, faculty in such courses should also consider using methods that have been developed to ensure successful team work (added by Neelam: see, e.g. the widely reference work of Michaelsen on the topic).
   • CSE 3521 (AI 1): Some sections of this course require students to use MATLAB for the projects. This seems rather odd, given that it is a CSE course. Nevertheless, individual course instructors have considerable freedom in the details of the courses that they teach ...
   • At the same time, Neelam noted, each course has a course coordinator who is expected to work with individual instructors of that course to ensure that all sections of the course remain faithful to the essential intent of the course as well as the published syllabus. If students have suggestions for changes in/comments regarding problems in courses, they might want to contact the relevant course coordinator (here is the list of coordinators).

6. Graduation application: Students intending to graduate in the near future should file their graduation application preferably two semesters before their intended graduation date. This will enable the Advising Office to know which courses these students might need in the near future and the dept. can try to arrange offerings of those courses. More generally, it would also help if students worked with the Advising Office on their schedule planning since not only will the advisors be able to offer such help (in, e.g., alerting students about scheduling, in the same semester, multiple courses that are reputed to have high programming workload) but also help the dept. with anticipating demand for various courses.

7. Surveys: Along the same lines, a couple of surveys were recently sent (from the Advising Office/the College of Engineering) to specific populations of students to try to get some information in order to better serve these groups of students. If you received a survey or surveys, please complete them as soon as possible if you have not yet done so.

8. Students being closed out of CSE courses: CSE and CIS pre-majors do not get priority enrollment in courses beyond CSE 2231/2321. The reason for this is to ensure that majors are able to take the courses needed to complete their programs in a timely manner. This also means that transfer students are not able to get into these courses until they are admitted to the major. This may cause difficulties for some of these students because they have, given the courses they have completed in their original schools, the necessary background to take some of these courses. The Undergrad Studies Comm. will take this factor into account as well in its discussions.

9. Daniel Meredith (.116), one of the students at the forum, mentioned Design for America and its peer mentorship program and how it can serve as a social plantform for learning. Please contact Daniel for more details (or search for the Design for America website).

10. Research opportunities: Students interested in undergrad research should talk to one of the advisors in the Advising Office or faculty directly. Dr. Rafe Wenger (.4) is the faculty member officially responsible for undergrad research. (As a general rule, students are most likely to get a favorable reaction if they approach a faculty member with a specific research problem/goal in mind rather than simply stating, "I want to do research; help!".)

11. Renovation of the undergrad lounge (DL 172): DL 172 will be remodeled/ redone in the near future. This will most likely happen during the break between Spring and Summer. It should take only a couple of weeks to finish.

12. Job market: A graduating senior noted that the job market for CS students is *excellent*.