The University of New South Wales

Notice of Meeting: CSE-EdC 16/3



Minutes of the meeting of the Computer Science and Engineering Education Committee
held at 12pm Friday 8 July 2016 in room K17-103 (HoS Meeting Room).

Enquiries concerning these minutes should be directed to jas@cse.unsw.edu.au.

John Shepherd
Chair

Agenda


    1. Apologies and Welcome

      In attendance: John Shepherd (Chair), Fethi Rabhi, Bruno Gaeta, Annie Guo, Eric Martin, Wayne Wobcke, Bradford Heap, Wen Hu, Helen Paik

      Apologies: Bruno Gaeta, Alan Blair, Andrew Bennett


    2. Minutes of Previous Meeting *

      CSE Teaching Committee 16/2 (29 April 2015) (incomplete, at this stage)


    3. Reports from Bodies outside CSE

      JAS mentioned the Accreditation process from May and the flow-on effects: provisional accreditation, capstone courses needed for Comp Sci and MIT, substantial core for MIT. This has led to a significant amount of work in developing course, stream and program proposals. These proposals are slowly making their way through the various committees, with the Faculty Programs Comittee being particularly fussy over some aspects of some proposals.


    4. Accreditation Status

      As noted in the previous item, all of programs were given provisional accreditation. Both Engineers Australia and ACS wanted to see the new courses and resulting program structures to be approvde before they were willing to give full accreditation. ACS had additional requirements for Computer Science (capstone) and MIT (capstone plus a more substantial core). They are anticipating that we will report approval of all proposals to them by September.


    5. Course/Stream/Program Revisions

      Summary of changes:

      • all core requirements are placed in streams, rather than programs
      • drop COMP1917, COMP1927, COMP2911 from all UG streams/programs
      • include COMP1511, COMP1521, COMP1531, COMP2511, COMP2521 in all UG streams/programs
      • drop COMP2121 and COMP2041 from core in CS streams (can be elective)
      • add COMP3121 and COMP3900 to core in CS streams
      • drop SENG1031 from SE stream (replace by COMP1531)
      • drop several streams from CS program due to lack of electives
      • add COMP9021, COMP9024, COMP9311, COMP9331, COMP9900 as core in MIT

      Details of changes are in the slides that we went through in the meeting.

      New courses have flow-on implications to other courses. Some material from later courses has drifted down into the new core. Need to have a process in place to ensure that courses at all level remain/become coherent, with minimal overlap.

      WW asked about transition arrangements. JAS noted that it was not difficult to arrange for

      Query on why COMPBH does not have MATH1081 as core?

      More details are available in the Core Syllabus documents.


    6. Implementing the new Core Syllabus

      Need to get together a group of people to organise development of coherent set of material for all new core courses. Want, for each course, a set of material that is reusable across various offerings and usable by different people.


    7. Revising the Advanced Syllabus

      After the core courses are more completely specified, we need to look at all of the courses that follow on and fix (a) pre-reqs, (b) flow of content.

      Following on from the retreat, we need to identify a set of areas that the school wants to focus on, and develop a coherent set of offerings in each area.


    8. CATEI Results for 16s1

      JAS described that the average CATEI result for the School had been around the Faculty average for the last few semesters but in 16s1 it had dropped significantly below the Faculty average. WW suggested that increased numbers might be responsible. BH noted that COMP2911 was taught almost exactly the same as previous offerings but the CATEI score dropped. The only difference was more students. WW also suggested that very low response rates might be part of the cause, attracting more response from people who were not happy with the course. Discussion on ways to improve the response rate threw up a few ideas. Student reps also noticed that CATEI does not seem to lead to significant course improvement, which disincentivises students from completing the survey.

      Some discussion on Course Outlines. Need more consistency, and need to be available prior to course running (e.g. at enrolment time). Further discussion on consistency in how courses are run e.g. for plagiarism handling, special consideration, supplementary exams.


    9. New Assessment Schema for 4th Year Theses

      HP presented the new Thesis Assessment criteria. This is detailed on the Thesis Course Webpage.


    10. Course Revision: COMP9444 Neural Networks

      Alan Blair noted that he was proposing to revive and update the contents of the COMP9444 Neural Networks course.


    11. 2025 Strategy: New Term Timetable

      UNSW seems to be pressing ahead with various initiative in the 2025 Strategy. of its "trimester model". Concensus is starting to emerge around the "Stanford model", which involves three terms in (roughly) Feb-May, Jun-Aug, Sep-Dec.


    12. For noting: Conduct of CSE Courses

      One point that was noted in the accreditation was the wide variation in Course Outlines for CSE courses. In a similar vein, how issues like plagiarism, special consideration, supplementary exams are handled across courses seems to vary a little from course to course. An informal working group (John Shepherd, Andrew Taylor, Gabi Keller, Kylie Wang) will produce some documentation and procedures to try clarify how things should be done, to reduce variation, and to provide online support to simplify these kinds of tasks.


    13. For noting: Cleaning the Handbook

      The UNSW Handbook, and various other online sources such as the CSE website, refer to courses that have not been offered for several years and appear unlikely to be offered in the future. We plan to remove such courses from the Handbook for 2017 and clean up the other places where these courses are referenced. The courses will not be cancelled yet, unless the "owners" tell us that they do not intend to offer them again.


    14. For noting: 4-year Advanced Computer Science program

      Owing to issues with the separate honours year (program 4515) on top of the 3978 program, and for various other reasons outlined in Brad Hall's submission to the 16/1 Education Committee meeting, we plan to introduce a new 4-year Computer Science program leading to an Honours-level degree. A proposal will be presented later in the year with the goal to introduce the program in 2018. The 4515 program will be retained to allow students from other institutions to transfer to CSE to do Honours.


    15. Any Other Business