Minutes of Teaching Committee Meeting - 13 September 2002

Present: billw (chair), chak, bradh, Xianhang (student representative), kenr, steve, sridevan, charlesw, carrollg, ashesh, lambert

  1. Change of credit points for COMP9242 to 6 uoc was approved. (That is, it will go forward to Faculty Education Committee.)

  2. Australian Computer Society accreditation for BSc CompSc: working party of Bill Wilson, Tim Lambert and Achim Hoffmann appointed.

  3. Revue participation be counted against Gened requirements? After some discussion, it was decided to await the outcome of Brad Hall's enquiries about what happens in this regard for students involved in the Med and Law Revues.

  4. Java course for PGs Item deferred in the absence of Paramesh and John Shepherd.

  5. Future of COMP4001: members of the committee wanted to hear the views of John Potter in relation to the interaction of this matter with the COMP20yy proposal, so the item was deferred.

  6. Prizes for top students: Brad Hall, Carroll Graham, and Andrew Taylor will investigate the difficulty of choosing recipients of such prizes, using data from past enrolments. (No, retrospective prizes are not proposed.)

  7. The proposal to change the way CS honours results are determined was approved in the following form:

    Honours will be awarded on the basis of straight WAM:

    >=761st
    >=682/1
    >=652/2

    The cases of any student who would receive 3rd class honours under this scheme will be considered individually.

  8. Quality control in teaching

    Recommendations to Head of School/HoSAC:

    1. that each course should have, as well as an LIC, a course director, or perhaps a small group performing this function. Details of course director role should be worked out within the ambit of proposal 3 (below), but would be broadly quality control, including appropriate assessment and timely marking and feedback, content, website, and others;
    2. that the School should establish a Teaching Support Unit, which would include an expert in teaching/teacher education. This person would work with lecturers, initially in mission-critical courses and courses with low survey ratings;
    3. that a School Teaching Quality Retreat should be held in late November. This retreat would work out, inter alia, the way that the course direction would work (see 1 above).

  9. IEAust re-accreditation for BE Soft Eng: Ken Robinson to contact IEAust, directly or via the Head of School, to find out the official outcome of last year's accreditation round for Software Engineering. [Ken wrote a response to the draft recommendation of IEAust but has not received a reply. It is not clear that the School has received any official confirmation of the final outcome, or a final report from IEAust.]

  10. IEAust accreditation - development of a case for BE Bioinformatics. Item deferred.

  11. Student comment on difficulty of obtaining IT (Industrial Training) - should we relax our conditions? Deferred pending a report that Peter Ho (IT Coordinator) plans to provide. It was stated that other Engineering Schools have been permitting students to do unpaid IT for some years; we may have to do likewise.

  12. Allocation of examination marking. Item deferred

  13. Discussion of Program Transfer Process. Item deferred 

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