Spring 2012 CS Undergraduate Studies Committee Notes
Monday, January 09, 2012 CS Course/Program Outcomes Notification for ABET - And this is a new one for the start of each term, informing instructors of course and program outcomes. If a 4xx level required course, it will also ask them to collect direct assessment data on program outcomes as we have in the past
BS CS - Review of prior changes - CS100 improvement on outcomes, need to increase ethics/social components. CS110 is non-majors, need to check against NSF outcomes with their exam after Spring 2012. CS330 English speaking TA helps, but still a challenging class to cover all outcomes depending on who teaches. Need to review outcomes with each faculty before the term to ensure coverage. CS350/CS351 new outcomes for fall 2012, better C programming transition.
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Meeting 2/6/12 notes - New CS443 Compiler Theory being taught in Fall 2012 (and every 3rd or 4th term) S12_CS443_Objectives.pdf
BS CS - From alumni surveys, concentrating on outcome K, s/w engineering skills. The idea is to define a small number of "themes" - requirements, specifications, design, version control, testing - and for each, give specific concepts to be integrated into CS courses that involve programming, starting simply. Also update CS487 with latest s/w eng topics. Need to call a s/w engeering improvement meeting, update CS487 and improve s/w eng topics embedded in other classes where appropriate, Bauer will enable meeting (Saelee, Beckman, Bistriceanu, Korel, Aldawud). This is the main effort for this term based on S11/F11 assessment cycle data. Virgil - I'm trying to invigorate the class by having multiple small teams, each of them with their own project, following an agile methodology as much as possible -- even though being an undergraduate student is not exactly conducive to working a in a team-focused agile environment.
Raicu looking into new undergrad cloud/distributed computing class (CS451) and also UG specialization in cloud/mobile (CS442 Mobile Dvlp, CS451, CS455 Networking, CS553 Cloud Computing)
Need to think about expanding advertising and offering of CS442 Mobile Dvlp. Currently every other semester and limited to 30 students (lab size)
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CS Undergraduate committee meeting - Monday 2/27 12:30pm
BS CS - Considering removing outcome I, be prepared to enter top ranked grad school, because only a small percentage of our BS in CS students go directly to grad school, maybe 15%.
CS 115 - Reviewing CS115/CS116 outcomes: Looking to increase coverage of s/w eng topics of testing and UML diagrams. Better coordination between all CS115 sections and CS116 sections. Same calendar, exam levels, etc. Investigate new office hours strategies (online?) for CS UG Tas. Need better placement for transfer students (and possibly C/D CS115 students). Bauer will work with Winans/Koutsogiannakis to develop a CS116 readiness exam. Also, look to add another required (3 hour) UG CS programming class, for spring semester, CS115 as prereq. Would be showing other programming paradigms (functional?), support for dual core/parallel, and issues of state and complexity.
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Monday, March 19
retention and graduation rates - S12_retention and graduation.xls This is the first time we looked at this in detail. need to look at it periodically. Pretty wide variance on 1-2 year retention. seems to be related to unqualified students. With internal transfers we do graduate a similar number of students as we bring in. Targets should be >90% 1-2 year (stay at IIT, internal transfers OK), and >70% 5 year graduation (including internal transfers). Will update in a couple years and also look at transfer studentss
Coterminals Approved - University approved coterminal degrees, 9 hours from BS degree also counting for MS degree. UG scholarship extended for 1 year. 3.25 or above GPA, 60 hours completed to apply
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Monday, May 07, 2012
Faculty teaching new classes (for them) are sent course objectives and instructor/course manager contacts
good insight to intro CS currriculum. http://link.cs.cmu.edu/files/ugrad-report.pdf see here what CMU did, it looks like they teach both functional and imperative first, and then OO later Matt and I had discussed re-writing the CS 115 goals and objectives and this paper was the paper we initially discussed as a starting point for the new CS 115 goals & objectives. I think the paper does provoke the discussion to re-think our entire undergrad program beyond just CS 115. I would be interested in joining a group that will address not just the parallel programming but the entire undergrad program's goals and objectives