Agenda for Teaching Committee Meeting 14 September 2001

  1. Accreditation follow-up:
    1. ACS accreditation requires that the following items be covered:
      • interpersonal communications
      • ethics/social implications/professional practice
      • project management and quality principles
      They (specifically the ACS rep on the IEAust panel) have accepted that these are covered in SE. SE however has SENG4921 Professional Issues and Ethics, and project management/quality material interspersed in SENG workshops etc. Presumably the interpersonal communications stuff is seen to be coming osmotically from working in groups in SENG workshops and elective courses.

      If we want CS accredited, we will probably have to ensure that CS students get some exposure to these themes.
      Possibility: we could make COMP4920 Professional Issues and Ethics compulsory for CS students, and also get them to take COMP3710 Software Project Management.

    2. Should a strict software engineering process be followed in SENG4910 (with report) / SENG4911? What about COMP4910/1? What about CS honours projects? What about BINF4910/1?

  2. Subjects to run in 2002: (draft here).
    1. COMP9024 in summer session? Arun has approved paying someone to do this - e.g. someone from UTS or Sydney; Lab constraints
    2. COMP2041 in both sessions?
    3. Confirmation that COMP3720 will run in first session (only) and COMP4920 in second session (only).
    4. Allocation for first and second year courses:
      Course
      		LIC Session 1LIC Session 2LIC Summer
      COMP1001
      Papagelis
      Papagelis
      not offered
      COMP1011
      ?
      Chakravarty
      not offered
      COMP1711
      Buckland
      not offered
      not offered
      COMP1021
      Ho
      Pagnucco
      ?
      COMP1721
      not offered
      Taylor
      not offered
      COMP1091
      Engelhardt
      not offered
      not offered
      COMP2011
      El Gindy
      Potter
      not offered
      COMP2711
      Foo
      not offered
      not offered
      COMP20yy
      ?
      ?
      not offered
      COMP2021
      Diessel
      Diessel
      not offered
      COMP2041
      Taylor
      Shepherd
      not offered

  3. New course proposal: COMP9025

  4. Ross Jeffery has asked for the issue of allocation of examination marking to be raised. "It may be that the load ctee wants input from the TC in this regard, or maybe the other way around."

  5. John Shepherd: As part of the "standards" process, can we take a look at standards for project/assignment assessment?

    Over the last year or two, I've had to repair some really sloppy marking by some of our casuals and top-up students. Particularly annoying were examples where marks had been deducted without any justifcation being provided and where the markers were unable to provide justification when pressed. (My interpretation was that the markers didn't bother to put in any effort, but wanted to give the appearance of some effort by producing a range of marks).

    I presume the current standard requirement is something like:

    "Xmark" makes it not too difficult to annotate project submissions so this is not imposing an unreasonable overhead.

    If it's not standard practice, could we make it so? If it already is, could people remind their markers more frequently?

    This problem is particularly acute for postgrad coursework students who otherwise get little feedback on their progress during semester, because we don't provide them with things like tutes/labs (in most subjects).

    Another assignment-related idea that comes up reasonably frequently in course evaluations is that students would like assignment specs to be available at the start of session. I don't know how feasible it is to ask LICs to provide assignment specs at the same time as they provide Course Outlines (which everyone seems to manage to do by the end of week 1).

  6. Follow-up on COMP20yy. When COMP2011 was modified last year, the concept was that there would be a new course, dubbed COMP20yy, that would complement COMP2011. COMP2011 now does object-oriented programming. This is as well as introducing students to Java, and teaching them some of the data structures material. Data structures taught include some requested by courses for which COMP2011 is a prerequisite, e.g. hash tables and B-trees.

    We need to think about what has been excised from COMP2011 (e.g. memory management data structures, storage device characteristics) and whether it warrants mounting COMP20yy, and how COMP20yy would fit into CE, SE, CS, and Bioinformatics.

    What the Potter committee report said about COMP20yy:

    COMP20yy will cover software development in the large, focusing on software architecture, library design and design for reuse, component-based development, thread-safety of components, software deployment and configuration management. Systematic integration-based testing will be covered. May be appropriate to consider multiple language development (e.g. component development + scripting).
  7. Should COMP9021 switch back to C? This year we left COMP9021 teaching mainly Java, and a little C at the end, with COMP9024 doing more C and then the data structures course. John Shepherd reports:
    My query a few weeks ago revealed that none of the follow-up postgrad courses *required* Java ... the most common request was (paraphrased) "some level of programming maturity."

    Doing C in COMP9021 would have the advantage that we could offer COMP9021/1021 in summer session (instead of just 1021).

  8. Maintenance revisions to Bioinformatics. As approved, BE Bioinformatics does not include a Professional Issues and Ethics course nor an Industrial Training provision. The approved fourth year structure is:
    UoCS1UoCS2
    6BINF4910 Thesis Part A12BINF4911 Thesis Part B
    6Elective A6Elective B
    6Elective C6Elective D
    3COMP3720 Total Quality Management
    3GenEd
    2424
    Electives A-D come two from a list of Life Science courses and two from COMP3+ courses.

    The minimalist fix is to introduce BINF4903 Industrial Training (0 UoC, no sweat), and BINF4920 Professional Issues and Ethics (3 UoC, where to fit it in?). You can argue that they will get their professional issues and ethics integrated into BINF1001/2001/3001, but the only mention of anything vaguely relevant seems to be in BINF1001, where the handbook entry says, in part:

    Structure of biotechnology industry stressing commercial, regulatory, and intellectual property areas. Diversity of industry sector and commercial case studies including biopharmaceuticals and gene therapy, use of transgenic plants and animals.

  9. Steve Matheson: proposal to withdraw BE Computer Engineering MCom program until it is modified to prevent students from enrolling in the program at the end of third year, substituting introductory Commerce courses for 3 of their professional electives, and then withdrawing from the MCom at the end of year 4 and cashing in their chips for a BE Computer Engineering. The Faculty has confirmed that the current rules permit this. Steve's notes. Dialog with Tim Hesketh

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