Minutes of Teaching Committee Meeting on 29 July 2005

1. School's plagiarism policy: Manuel presented his Draft Proposal for our School  as addendum to the University Palgiarism Policy as the assignments in our School are typically unlike essays which are the focus of the University Policy. It was agreed that students, as outlined in the draft, should get severe penalties already for the first offence. It was also agreed that negative marks up to the extend of 50% of the maximum mark achievable in the respective piece of assessment, if students do not see the lecturer after being requested to do so (for the purpose of clarifying what happened with apparently copied work). There is also a plan of staged penalties where the penalty increases for repeat offenders. A central database would inform lecturers, whether a student offended already (in other courses), and the penalty can be adjusted accordingly. Students will be informed of their entries in the central database.
   It was also agreed that the School Plagiarism Policy should receive more discussion at a later stage, but that for the current session (session 2/2005) an interim policy needs to be adopted (i.e. Manuel's proposal amended according to the issues mentioned above).
   

2. Prerequisite change for COMP9333 Advanced Computer Networks: Currently COMP9331 Computer Networks&Applications and COMP9332 Network Routing and Switching are prerequisites. Proposal to remove COMP9332 as prerequisite. Proposed changes to prerequisites were approved.
   
3. New course proposal on a fourth year course on Optimisation, Constraint Programming, etc. Details were tabled. Exclusion with Operatoions research courses offered elsewhere in UNSW, such as MATH2140 and ECON2208 were requested. Apart from that the course outline was agreed on and approved.
   
New version of first and second year courses for the faculty common first year to commence in 2006. See here for current draft to be discussed in the TC meeting. Here is the proposal for replacing COMP1081 (intro to computing for other engineers).  Some discussion concerning whether COMP2911 should be prerequisite for the School's 3rd year courses. It was noted that students outside our programs may choose not to take 3rd year courses if they require more COMP2911 as a prerequisite over and above the COMP1921 Data Structures and Algorithms course. However, it was recognized that this is a matter to be resolved later.  Richard agreed to change the item 'Professional Ethics' listed in the course description of COMP1911 to 'Professional Issues'. The new versions were agreed for the common first year and were approved.

4. Transfer rules for transfer between our degrees including Computer Engineering which will be part of the common first year. The idea is that students do not need to go through UAC once they are in one of our programs and they want to change their program. What extended or advanced courses should run in 2006? This topic was raised but then postponed to a detailed discussion in the following week between Achim and the Program Directors, so that rules can be proposed on 5 August 2005 to the Faculty UG Education Committee.
5. Discussion on experiences with extended courses and advanced courses. What extended or advanced courses should run in 2006?
   Some enrolment data as food for thought:
   • COMP1721 Higher Computing 1B enrols-03s2: 109
   • COMP1721 Higher Computing 1B enrols-04s2: 82
   • COMP1721 Higher Computing 1B enrols-05s2: 53 - figures not final
   • COMP2711 Higher Data Organisation enrols-03s1: 117
   • COMP2711 Higher Data Organisation enrols-04s1: 61
   • COMP2711 Higher Data Organisation enrols-05s1: 51
   Enrolment figures from 2005s1 for Extended courses:
   • 10 COMP3821/9801 Ext Algorithms&Prog Techniques
   • 10 COMP3891 Ext Operating Systems
   • 13 COMP3931/9833 Ext Computer Networks & App
   • 7 COMP9814 Ext Artificial Intelligence 
   The student members found the extended courses very valuable from the student's perspective. Richard mentioned that the Higher versions of the introductory courses would better be run as extended versions. which might be both, more economical to run as well as more beneficial to students.
   

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

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