Minutes of Teaching Committee Meeting - 13 July 2001

1. Uniform policy on our tutors giving private tutoring After discussion, the following version of the proposed policy was approved:
   1. Private tutoring by our casual tutors is permitted.
   2. It must be declared to the Subject Admin, together with the names and Ids of students involved.
   3. A tutor (casual or otherwise) may not provide paid private tutoring to a student in any course which the tutor is currently working as a tutor.
   4. The School should set up a register of recommended tutors.

2. School Standard for 6 UoC Courses. The committee reaffirmed the present policy, according to which a 6 UoC undergraduate or combined UG/PG class should received 14 weeks of lectures, with 3 lectures each week (except where public holidays prevent this). Undergraduate and combined ug/pg classes should also have tutorials and/or laboratory classes as appropriate to the topic. By combined ug/pg class is meant, for the purpose of this recommendation, a class which is offered under two course codes, one of which has the prefix COMP9. In particular cases (an obvious example being Readings in Computer Science and Engineering), courses with a component of reading replacing lectures could be individually approved.

3. Course offerings and allocation for summer session. COMP1021 and a third year/postgraduate course (probably COMP3421/9415) will be offered (lecturers TBA). The committee noted that it would be desirable COMP2011 and extra third year courses (e.g. networks) to be mounted in summer session, but it does not seem likely that staff can be found to do this.

4. Selection and Training of Casual Tutors The committee agreed that a comprehensive briefing was appropriate, that known plagiarists should be excluded from employment as a tutor, that the briefing should include (as well as EEO/AA and OH&S and other things) material on ethics and on appropriate practice in marking (e.g. insisting on commenting and appropriate formatting and structure in assignments). The Faculty of Engineering runs Tutor Training Workshops. The next one is next Tuesday, which is too soon for us (though anyone who reads this and who wants to send a particular prospective tutor to it is welcome to contact Cheryl Kelly, Dean's Unit, ext 5320, c.kelly@unsw.edu.au, for details.)

5. Quality control: Specifically, on plagiarism:
   • The School should implement a uniform plagiarism policy of a 0 FL for any recipient of a copied assignment and a penalty of loss of all marks for the assignment for any originator. The mark 0 FL should only be used for this purpose.

   • The School should implement a central database of persons penalised in either of these ways, which would record details of course, session, lecturer, originator and recipient, and copies of the original and copied programs with notes on the similarities. Multiple offences could then in many cases be referred to the Deputy Registrar for exclusion. Students would have to have access to their own record (if any) in such a database, on request, and a right to have their name removed if on review the evidence was found to be wanting.

   • The School should investigate and if possible implement adding plagiarism detection support to sms, so that a lecturer could send off all assignments to one of a set of supported plagiarism detectors with a few mouse-clicks.

   • That lab exams should be held, where possible, and used as hurdles to prevent people without appropriate programming skills from passing courses. Where this was not possible, examination questions should be included that tested understanding of assignment material.

   • That a person who has received a mark of 0 FL in a COMP course will not be employed by the School as a casual tutor.

   • That the School should establish a plagiarism working group, including interested staff, postgraduate students, and COMPSOC representation, to try to ensure that the plagiarism detection methods in use in the School are as strong as possible.

6. Advanced Graphics pilot course proposal was approved with a prerequisite of a CR in COMP3421/9415 or equivalent and a quota of 40.

7. Standardised policy on supplementary exams: It is proposed that approvals for supplementary examinations should be centralised in order to achieve uniform practice. In particular, students who applied for special consideration more than 72 hours after the examination should be refused, except in cases of genuine difficulty (e.g. student in a coma). The supplementary exams officer would have access to an applicant's School Office file, which includes past applications for special consideration. This would make it more difficult to claim that one's parents had just died more than once (as recently happened).

   The possibility of announcing well before the exams that supplementary exams will be oral (and of course actually using oral exams) was discussed. Some lecturers are already doing this, and a further experiment with this is planned for the coming session.

School of Computer Science & Engineering
The University of New South Wales
Sydney 2052, AUSTRALIA
Phone:  +61 2 9385 6876
Fax:    +61 2 9385 4071