CSE Undergraduate Studies Committee
Minutes of Meetings (2014-'15)

Spring:	Feb. 16;
Fall:	Oct. 3; Sept. 18;

02/16/'15, 1:30 pm

1. Annual forum
2. Philosophy 1337, CSE 2501
3. POCAT
4. GPA for admission to major

1. Annual forum: We decided to have the forum on Tuesday, March 24, at 5:30-7:00(?) pm. Nikki and Neelam will work on the arrangements.
2. Phil 1337, CSE 2501: Michelle Mallon (the coordinator for CSE 2501) brought up the overlap between Phil 1337 (which some students take to meet the ethics course requirement for engineering majors. One possible solution was to omit, from the programs of students who have taken Phil 1337, the requirement of CSE 2501 and add that hour to the tech electives requirements. One concern was that CSE 2501 also contributes to developing students' communication skills.
   Coincidentally, Justin D'Arms, the new chair of the Philosophy Dept., had recently got in touch with engineering's Core Committee (which Neelam is chair of this year) to discuss the ethics courses that they offer and Neelam was scheduled to meet with him right after the UGSC meeting. Prof. D'Arms seemed quite willing to consider the idea of adding oral presentations to Phil 1337 and seemed to think that they would go well with the course. So, based on further email discussions among UGSC members, we will go with this change. This has to be still approved by faculty and submitted to the colleges since it involves changes in the programs. (The proposal for introducing tech elective options for the programs has to be still submitted to the colleges. This change, assuming faculty approves it, will likely be submitted at the same time.)
   Added in Sp '15: After some further discussion, the lecturers involved most closely with Phil 1337 felt that adding oral presentations to the course would require the course to become 4 cr hrs instead of the current 3 hrs. After some email discussions, UGSC felt this was appropriate and we requested Philosophy to proceed. Their current plan is to develop the course in Au '15 and offer the first section in Sp '16. We also pointed them to the rubric we use for evaluating student presentations and mentioned some practices (such as providing detailed comments on the first draft of a student's paper as quickly as possible so that the student can use that in preparing his/her presentation) used in CSE 2501.
3. POCAT: After a brief discussion, we realized that the summary results for one of the questions (question 9) were incorrect. Neelam has corrected the results and the corrected version is now available. With the correction, student performance in that question seems reasonable.
   On the other hand, the performance on the question that asked about encoding of information about the states of a finite state machine were poor. The discussion suggested that the problem may lie, in part, in the way the question is phrased and some alternative versions were suggested. We will try these new versions in the test this semester.
   One question that performance has been consistently poor in is question 14, related to the database course and this time was no exception. But Glen pointed out that there might be a way to make some changes in the distractors to better tease out the possible reasons behind this. We will try this in the test this semester.
4. GPA for admission to major: The GPA is scheduled to increase to 3.2 starting this summer. This will result in a lot of unhappy students because many will get closed out. But this seems unavoidable and we will have to see how it plays out.

The meeting was adjourned at 2:40.

Next meeting: ??

10/3/'14

1. Tech elective hours
2. POCAT
3. Looking ahead

1. Elective hours: The faculty has approved the changes in the BS-CSE and BS-CIS programs related to ECE 2000, 2100. This means that the number of credit hours for the required courses will go down by 2.5 hours for BS-CSE and by 1.5 hours for BS-CIS.

   After a brief discussion, the committee decided that these hours will be added to the tech elective of the two programs. The committee also decided that, of these hours, 1 hour will be added to the CSE-courses portion of the tech elective hours (so that students in both programs will be required to take a minimum 9 hours of CSE elective courses as against 8 hours as is currently the case). The remaining hours will be added to the (CSE + non-CSE) portion. It was also decided that in the case of students who complete an approved minor, that will be counted towards the (CSE + non-CSE) portion; in the case of BS-CIS, since the Arts & Sc. College does not allow double-counting, the (CSE + non-CSE) hours will be waived.

   Neelam will write up these changes in official program change proposals and send them to the respective colleges.

2. POCAT: POCAT was designed many years ago when we were under quarters and many more courses were required than are now. In particular, many of the courses currently in the category of "core choices" used to be required. So the question is what changes we should make to POCAT to get the best possible assessment results from it.

   After an extended discussion, the committee felt that it makes sense to include, in the POCAT, questions related to all of the required courses:
         Software I, II; Foundations I, II; Systems I, II.
   As well as all of the core choice courses:
         3231, 3241 (Softw. eng., Databases); 3321, 3341 (Formal langs., Prog. langs.); 3421, 3461 (Architecture, Networking); 3521, 3541 (AI, Graphics);
         3901, 3902 (Jr. project courses on Web apps and Games).
   For the latter set, students will be asked to answer only questions for courses that they have taken. (And to help them with that, we will make available, to the students, their Advising Reports during the test so that they can remind themselves of the courses they have completed.)

   Neelam will work with the course coordinators/instructors of the respective courses to create a good bank of questions to work with.

The meeting was adjourned at 4:35

Next meeting: ??

09/18/'14, 12:30 pm

1. Changes in ECE 2000, 2100, and related topics;
2. Possible revisions to POCAT
3. Looking ahead (next ABET evaluation)

1. Changes in ECE 2000, 2100 and related: BS-CSE majors are required to take ECE 2000 and 2100; BS-CIS majors are required to take ECE 2000. At the last Undergrad Forum (in March 2014, report here), some students raised concerns about these courses. The courses are currently organized as follows: roughly, the first two-thirds of ECE 2000 deals with digital logic; the last one-third of ECE 2000 and the first one-third of ECE 2100 deals with signal processing; the last two-thirds of ECE 2100 deals with analog circuits. The main comment was regarding the last third of ECE 2000 and first one-third of 2100, i.e., the signal processing material. First, the break between the courses meant that students had a hard time in 2100 (especially if they took 2000 in spring and 2100 in the fall). Second, most students found the topic rather mystifying and had no idea why they were being asked to take it. Apparently, the ECE students provided similar feedback, especially with regard to the first reason. (The second reason did not apply because ECE majors took additional courses that built on the signal processing material.). Neelam conveyed these comments to the ECE faculty.

   Over summer, the ECE faculty apparently had a thorough discussion of possible ways to reorganize the courses and came up with the following proposal:

   1. Replace ECE 2000, 2100 (each 4 cr hrs) with ECE 2060 (2.5 cr hrs), 2050 (2.5 cr hrs), 2020 (3 cr hrs).
   2. ECE 2060 will consist of the digital logic portion of ECE 2000, essentially the first two-thirds of that course; same prereqs as for ECE 2000.
   3. ECE 2020 will be analog circuits, more or less the last two-thirds of ECE 2100 but with some additional content and added labs; same prereqs as for ECE 2000 (so it can be taken at the same time as 2060).
   4. ECE 2050 will consist of the last third of 2000 and the first third of 2100 (i.e., the signal processing material); prereq is ECE 2060 (and possibly Math 2568, Linear algebra).
   Their suggestion was that BS-CIS majors be required to take ECE 2060 (reducing the number of hours from 4 to 2.5); and that BS-CSE majors be required to take ECE 2060 and 2020 (reducing their number from 8 to 5.5). ECE 2050 will not be required for either BS-CSE or for BS-CIS but it may be appropriate as a tech elective for students interested in such topics as image processing that involve signal processing.

   During ECE's undergrad committee meeting that Neelam attended, another point was discussed. ECE 3567, a 1 cr hr project course (Microcontroller Lab) is of interest to some BS-CSE majors. This course used to be ECE 567 under quarters and CSE majors were required to take it under the quarter system and many of them enjoyed the course. So ECE 3567 would be a useful tech elective for BS-CSE students. But the prereq for ECE 3567 is ECE 2560, a 2 cr hr course, which has some overlap with the assembly language/architecture portion of our 2421, but has more of a hardware angle to it; they use actual boards rather than a simulator. Following some email discussion, Gagan suggested that it may be appropriate to allow our students to take ECE 2560 as a tech elective in spite of the slight overlap. This will better prepare them for ECE 3567.

   After some discussion, UGSC approved recommending to the faculty the following changes to our programs:

   1. The BS-CIS program be revised to require ECE 2060 in place of ECE 2000 (reducing the number of hours from 4 to 2.5).
   2. The BS-CSE program be revised to require ECE 2020 and 2060 in place of ECE 2000, 2100 (reducing the number of hours from 8 to 5.5).
   Neelam will send the above changes to tenure-track faculty and ask for approval.

   UGSC also discussed the question of what should happen to the hours that are freed up by these changes. The possibilities include adding them to the tech elective hours (so the tech elective hours for BS-CIS would increase from 15 to 16.5, and BS-CSE from 15 to 17.5); declare these hours to be "free electives", i.e., students may take any 2000-level or higher course on any topic that they may be interested in; or reduce the programs' sizes by the corresponding number of hours. Moreover, the first option (adding the hours to the tech electives) presents two possibilities: either require or not require these hours to be CSE courses. The option of reducing the program sizes, unlike the other options, would involve many levels of approval (up to the Board of Trustees?). The committee decided that this needs to be discussed further before determining what to recommend to the tenure-track faculty.

   Important note added in Sp '15: After further consultations, ECE decided to make some additional changes so that ECE 2060 will be 3 credit hours rather than 2.5. This makes it much simpler for us since we/our students will not have to figure out how to handle the 0.5 cr hrs. With this change, CSE majors will have their ECE hours reduced by 2 which will be added to their tech electives; and CIS majors will have their ECE hours reduced by 1 which will be added to their tech elective hours.

   The meeting was adjourned at 1:30.

   Next meeting: ??

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