Spring 2005 CS Undergraduate Studies Committee
Notes
Meeting Notes
- Feb 21 12:30 - 1:30 - (DG) We held our undergrad studies first meeting
of the semester today: Attendees: David Grossman Matt Bauer Shlomo Argamon
Wei Gen Yee
- Assessments (Step D1) have been collected and summarized
(Step D2) for last Spring and this Fall. We will review them and
come up with recommendations for Fall 2005.
- Detailed Course Review - CS201 materials collected for Spring 2005,
to be reviewed in Fall 2005 - collect the sample graded materials already
requested for NCA assessment, and also give us a copy (paper or electronic)
of your lecture notes/slides, www page, all materials for class, etc. We
review and give feedback next fall to you and course manager
- Specializations: Two were discussed. Shlomo will write up one on his
courses and David will write up one on Information Security. Shlomo will
send them in to make it so they are included in the catalog.
- Requiring additional communications course. Currently we have a requirement
of tech writing or public speaking. David proposed changing the "or"
to an "and". Matt has reviewed the idea and found that it would
make it very hard for students to easily complete a minor. David has withdrawn
his proposal.
- Review of CS 430 materials. Materials for CS 430 were collected last
semester, and paper copies available. Everyone will bring a one page summary
of their findings to our next meeting. Assignments were made as follows:
- Course Notes and Syllabus: Shlomo
- Quizzes and exams: David
- Projects and Homeworks: Wei Gen, Nazli, Zhiling
- Accreditation. NCA Accreditation is coming in 2006-2007. The committee
blessed our existing materials for CS and they will be posted to the department
web site. Matt will co-ordinate. CIS needs similar materials and Matt will
put together a draft for our next meeting. Our course evaluation process
needs some improvement -- particularly it is not clear that course managers
are actively looking at feedback. Shlomo and Wei Gen will come back next
meeting with a proposed end-to-end process for our review and, if approved,
we will take that to the next faculty meeting.
- MB presented summary format of course assessment info. I have summarized
all assessments from students and added instructor, course manager and
CS UG Committee feedback in color see attached SAMPLE.
- MB presented NCA materials
- Next meeting will be April 11th from 1-1:50 in SB 233
- Apr 11 12:30 - 1:30 - (DG)
- Continue review of assessments summarized
for last Spring and this Fall. We will review them (Step D1) and
come up with recommendations for Fall 2005.
- Two Specializations were approved for listing in the Undergraduate
Bulletin. CS or CIS majors would be able to complete either (or both) of
these specializations using their CS Electives and/or free electives. Because
of the heavy pre-requisites to take these courses, we do not foresee any
other majors being able to complete these specializations. Background Information
on "Specializations" from Educational Services (office that verifies
undergraduate program requirements) - The undergraduate bulletin uses the
word "specialization" instead of "concentration". Yes,
specializations appear on the transcript, but not the diploma. The departments
that offer specializations require 3-4 courses, except ECE which requires
6 courses for their only specialization. Both CAE and CHE use their technical
electives for the specialization courses so no additional courses need
to be taken by the student. ECE's specialization is so structured that
the student must take the 6 courses and these courses meet the 4 ECE professional
electives and one technical elective, so the student must take an additional
course.
- Specialization in Information Security - 4 courses required CS425 Database
Organization CS458 Information Security CS455 Data Communications CS549
Cryptography and Network Security The Information Security Specialization
is in direct support to getting the CS Dept approved as an NSA Center of
Excellence.
- Specialization in Information and Knowledge Management Systems - 4
courses required CS425 Database Organization CS48x Knowledge Management
(offered in Spring 2006 as CS495) and 2 of these 3 CS422 Introduction to
Data Mining CS429 Introduction to Information Retrieval Systems CS48x Intelligent
Text Analysis (currently offered as CS495) The Information and Knowledge
Management Systems Specialization is in direct result of an NSF grant received
by Dr. Argamon to develop an undergraduate course sequence in the topics.
- Approved Computer Information Systems Objectives and Outcomes ATTACHED
- will send complete document to CS Grad Committee for review/merge with
their materials, and then to CS Faculty for approval
- Review (IN ALL CAPS) of recent Univ of Ill - Urbana-Champaign BS in
CS changes This curriculum will apply to all students entering in Fall
'05 or later. Details can be found at http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/undergraduate/
- The main additions
- Systems Programming - CS 241 will cover material drawn from three 300-level
systems courses: CS 323, Operating Systems, CS 328, Distributed Systems,
and CS 338, Computer Networks. (These courses will be revised accordingly.)
CS 241 will teach these topics at a lower, more applied level. It is designed
to be taken earlier in the students’ course of study (second semester of
the sophomore year) than the current systems courses (normally taken no
earlier than second semester of the junior year). AT IIT, CS351 SYSTEMS
PROGRAMMING (CS REQUIRED), IS BEING REDESIGNED WITH MUCH OF THE SAME FOCUS
AS THIS COURSE. THE NEW CS351 IS GOING THROUGH REVIEW BY THE COURSE MANAGER
AND CS UNDERGRADUATE COMMITTEE
- Programming Studio - The purpose of this course is to insure that all
CS students possess good practical skills in computing. This is in part
to prepare them for the workplace, and in part to prepare them for upper-level
CS courses; though largely theoretical, those courses often involve programming,
so that poor programming skills are a definite hindrance to many students
in taking those classes. AT IIT, CS445 OBJECT ORIENTED DESIGN AND PROGRAMMING
(CS ELECTIVE), COVERS THE MAJORITY OF THE TOPICS IN THIS CLASS. CS445 IS
A VERY POPULAR CS ELECTIVE, ALMOST ALL CS MAJORS TAKE IT AS CS ELECTIVE
ALREADY
- requirement to take Senior Project, Senior Thesis, Software Engineering
Sequence IIT IPRO REQUIREMENT CAN OFFER STUDENT SIMILAR CAPSTONE EXPERIENCE
IN AN INTERDISCIPLINARY ENVIRONMENT. IIT BS IN CS ALSO REQUIRES A SOFTWARE
ENGINEERING CLASS (CS487)
- The main deletion is:
- required application sequence - The application sequence consists of
four to five courses (at least 12 credit hours) in some field outside of
computer science to which computing methodologies and practices can be
applied in a significant way. IIT BS IN CS NEVER REQUIRED SUCH A SEQUENCE,
IT IS POSSIBLE FOR A BS IN CS STUDENT TO COMPELTE AN ELECTIVE MINOR IN
AN AREA OTHER THAN CS.
- Reviewed the Current
Undergraduate Assessment Process/Calendar (We still need to review
the ABET document from 3 years ago to see if we have left anything out.)
- Initial presentation of proposed CS350/CS351 Course Objectives/Syllabi
(See Course Review also) -
decided needs initial review by CS350(Li)/CS351(Bauer)/CS450(Sun) Course
Managers, proposed changing CS450 Course Manager to Dr. Lan as she has
the time/interest. Need to verify with Dr. Sun.
- May 2 12:30-1:30 DG
- Approve updates to CS350/CS351 Course overviews
- (MB) Creating/Distrubuting/Collecting Student Course Assessments(Step
A1) and Instructor Course Assessments(Step A2)
- Completed Review Assessment
Summaries Spring04-Fall04 Key Updates below:
- CS100 - better textbook, way to challenge advanced and beginners
- CS115/116/201 - review of objectives
- CS350 - approve new course overview
- CS351 - approve new course overview
- CS450 - course needs redesign (Collection of detailed course materials
in Fall05 for Spring06 review)
- CS487 - More UML, course needs redesign (Collection of detailed course
materials in Sprign 06 for Fall06 review)
CS430 Detailed Course Review (from Fall 2004 Offering) (Step A3)
- Exams (DG) - Overall, the exams for CS 430 are right on target. The
material that should be covered in algorithms is covered and all of the
fundamental algorithms are there. My only suggestion would be to absolutely
insist on students providing an algorithm when asked for an algorithm.
In some cases, a test says "give the algorithm or code". I would
much prefer that students in an algorithm class really learn the difference
and to learn how to completely separate themself from the implementation
details. Finally, I am not convinced that enough feedback is given to students
in the class. In the samples I reviewed, incorrect answers resulted in
very few corrections. I think students would learn more if a more detailed
correction was given.
- HW (WY, NG, ZL) - here's a composite of our comments:
- Course stats - There were five homeworks in CS430, each of which had
about three submissions. Five homeworks seem light for a semester's course.
There is not enough drilling.
- Coverage - Asymptotic complexity (HW1) Recurrences (HW1) Quicksort
and sorting (HW2) Heaps (HW2) Trees (HW2) Lists (HW3) Hashing (HW3) B-trees
(HW4) Matrices (HW5) Greedy algorithms (HW5). Based on the course description
(http://www.cs.iit.edu/courses/cs430.pdf), graph algorithms should be in
the course, however, there were no graph algorithm assignments.
- Homework techique - Students are given custom problems and problems
from the text. They are later given the answer keys, which provide some
explanation. As a result,the particular comments on the homeworks were
skimpy (usually one or two short comments). We discussed this in the UG
Committee meeting, and decided that using the key is probably fine, especially
if the homeworks are reviewed during class. Note that giving students a
key makes reusing questions more difficult.
- The homeworks problems, in my opinion, should be more high-level, framing
problems in real-world scenarios that make students better understand data
structures. For example, "Joe wants to design a phone book where users
can efficiently find phone numbers given a name, or scroll through the
list of names. Which access structure should he use? What is the complexity
of a lookup operation, or a scroll operation?" The answer should be
a B-tree of some sort, and not hashing. Understandably, such questions
are hard to devise and grade, but I believe this is the way that CS practictioners
think: top down. Some problems are top down (e.g., questions 6 and 7 in
HW 5), but many are too mechanical to give the student a sense of the usefulness
of algorithms.Of course, some low level questions must be asked to ensure
that students know particularities of some algorithms. Perhaps students
should also write some algorithms and analyze them. For example, a student
may write and analyze an algorithm for some versionof the "Towers
of Hanoi" problem. Might be interesting.
- Should other topics, such as probabilistic analysis or counting, be
a part of the syllabus?
- Course Manager/Instructor Responses - this is great feedback,
thanks there is a 6th HW on graphs, I must have forgot to collect there
is also a programming assignment (I think I had copies of that) that usually
analyzes variosu approaches to a problem (sorting, knapsack, hashing, etc).
I agree that adding more top down problems is a directionm we want. probabilistic
analysis or counting is covered in pre-req class, CS330
- Detailed Course Review
Summary - CS430
Proposed Changes (from Spring/Summer/Fall 04 assessment cycle). (Step
E1)
- CS100 New Course Objectives
- CS115 add the following objectives - Implement basic error handling
- Apply appropriate problem-solving strategies - Use APIs (Application
Programmer Interfaces) and design/program APIs
- CS116 add the following objectives - Implement basic error handling
- Apply appropriate problem-solving strategies - Use APIs (Application
Programmer Interfaces) and design/program APIs Replace Syllabus Item 2nd
Object oriented Language (including compare and contrast), 2nd Programming
Environment, Arrays and Pointers, Functions with Review of CS115 material
- CS201 add the following objectives - Implement basic error handling
- Apply appropriate problem-solving strategies - Use APIs (Application
Programmer Interfaces) and design/program APIs Replace Syllabus Item 2nd
Object oriented Language (including compare and contrast), 2nd Programming
Environment, Arrays and Pointers, Functions with Review of CS115 material
- CS350/CS351 updates to Course Overviews
- Meet with faculty teaching a course for the first time to review objectives
and expectations for the course. CS330(Ren), CS445(Kirmani), CS458(Bistriceanu)