Standards Committee ******************** AY : 2006-2007 Meeting: Seventh Date : May 17, 2007 Time : 10:30-11:45 Place : Large Conf Room GITC 441x. *********************************************** Minutes of Standards Commitee Meeting (STC). by Alex Gerbessiotis *********************************************** ----------------------------------------------- 1. Meeting started at 10:30 am. 2. Present: Vincent Oria Andrew Sohn Alex Gerbessiotis (chairing the meeting). 3. Agenda Items: a. Course Coordination/Supervision (added) b. Departmental Faculty Meeting Dates (added) c. High School Programming Contest 4. Course Coordination. A. Sohn brought up this as an urgent issue. He feels that course coordination of undergraduate 100-level courses should go beyond having only common exams. Common-section courses should have common syllabus and common contents, proceed at approximately the same pace, have same labs with same contents, and activities of the TAs should also be coordinated and monitored. The committee unanimously agreed on acting immediately on the issue, and after contacting relevant faculty (coordinators of 100-level courses) to bring up the matter to the CS faculty. Immediate actions that will be taken will include the following. Action 1. The chair of the standards committee(STC Chair) will ask the Department chair for a list of undergraduate and graduate courses with coordinator names. Courses would include both graduate and undergraduate. If such a list is not available and needs to be composed, the committee will assist the Chair in doing so. The committe feels that only Tenured/Tenure-track faculty should act as coordinators of courses. Action 2. STC Chair will send the course advisors a feedback form about what needs to be done about course coordination at the 100-level. Action 3. In the first meeting of the Department in Fall 2007 the committee will ask the faculty to vote on the following items P1-P5 and also item P6 of the following section. P1. Approve a new list of course coordinators for undergraduate and graduate-level courses. P2. Concur that all course coordinators must be Tenured/Tenure-track faculty. Comment for P1,P2: We need to update existing lists, given that several faculty members will depart or have already departed from the Department. P3. Approve of the need that all 100-level courses should be closely coordinated, have and follow the same syllabus at the same approximate pace, have common Labs with common contents, and actively and usefully coordinate the activities of TAs involved with these courses. P4. Approve of the attendance of a coordinator in lectures offered by an adjunct faculty, TA, or special lecturer for the purpose of ensuring that the steps outlined in P3 are followed. P5. All sections of a graduate-level course follow the same textbook and a syllabus that is common at least 80% (eg. they teach the same material 11 weeks of the semester even if the order differs). 5. Departmental Faculty Meetings. The STC Chair brought up this issue. Faculty meetings are scheduled at random dates without much warning which makes advanced planning almost impossible. NJIT used to have a clear rule of when to hold a variety of meetings. The first Wednesday of the month was to be used for Departmental meetings, the second for Institute meetings or College meetings, and the third for University-wide lectures. These rules are not followed any more. In the first faculty meeting of Fall 2007 the committee will bring forward for vote the following item that was agreed upon unanimously. Proposal to approve that P6. The CS Department will hold its meetings on the first Wednesday of a calendar month. The only exception are the December/May meetings that might conflict with the examination period. Such meetings can then be held on a Reading Day concurrently with or independently of the Departmental Retreat. Such a rule does not exclude the possibility of other emergency meetings per departmental bylaws. Comment: Sep/Oct/Nov present no problems. Same for Feb/Mar/Apr. December/May meetings can be held along with the Retreats. One issue might be a faculty meeting in January after the beginning of the semester. Comment: P6 might get embedded in the proposed Departmental Bylaws. 6. High School Programming Contest (HSPC). Our Department held the NJIT High School Programming Contest for the fourth time this year. Approximately 40 high schools competed. A noteworthy event this year was the composition of the 1st team: two of its three members were female students. This alone could have been a well-publicized event worthy of state and possibly national coverage. However our HSPC still suffers on the publicity front due to lack of support and a proper budget. The committee attempted to offer some suggestions to its next organizer, Professor Ali Mili, given that two of its three members had been actively involved in past competitions. The committee also feels that the Department should be more involved in this event. More information about this topic is available separately as a Microsoft Word document named. HSPC-STC-Proposal.doc It can also be retrieved from http://web.njit.edu/~alexg/standards/protected/docs/HSPC-STC-Proposal.doc The document is dated May 17, 2007. 7. Grading Standards. The committee were pleased to learn that the IS Department and its chair, Professor M. Bieber were considering to adopt the CS grading standards for the IS courses of Summer 2007/Fall 2007 and beyond. The STC Chair had a meeting with Dr Bieber on Monday May 14, 2007 and the latter suggested that the standards could be extended to all the programs of the College including IT and Bioinformatics. There was full agreement on this issue. Given that for CS the grading standards are not permanent but are to be reevaluated after the Spring and Fall 2007 semesters, both parties agreed that the issue could be brought forward to a College meeting in Spring 2008 for final approval by the College around that time. 8. Discussion concluded at 11:45. Minutes compiled by Alex. Gerbessiotis.