Oct 2 2006 Draft

From MWCSWiki

The meeting commenced at 4:03pm, 10/2/2006, upon which the meeting minutes from last month’s department meeting were approved.

Karen presented two items that have recently been discussed before the faculty senate:

1. Although there has been no official motion, some senators have discussed possible changes to the current academic probation policy, the chief one being to raise the minimum GPA threshold so that student academic trouble is caught earlier on. The department was supportive of this change, although Ernie voiced that perhaps it should be required, rather than simply “expected,” for probationary students to meet with their academic advisors at the beginning of each semester.
2. There has been some hubbub generated around whether the meeting minutes submitted to the senate need to be “approved.” No strong opinions were raised, though the general thought was expressed that this perhaps entails unnecessary procedure.

Stephen will find out when the GRE is next offered (both general and subject-specific tests) and will send an e-mail to professors of upper division courses to alert their students to these dates.

Tim and Dave from IT support have so far not been responsive to attempts to involve them in preparation for the programming contest, and Stephen will seek to arrange a meeting with them this week to plan a course of action.

It was generally agreed that classes on the Friday of the CCSC conference do not need to be canceled, and Stephen will ask Jodie for the schedule of courses on Fridays so that we know when we will be able to move the PCs around in preparation for Saturday morning’s contest.

A request was presented to update our student outcomes, but since our major is in flux, we aren’t going to do this right now. We will update them within the next four years, after the dust has settled around these changes to the major.

Zvezdan will find out how many students need to take the MFAT this semester (presumably ten or less), and determine the time and place for the exam.

Ernie instructed that if students are finding PuTTY connections slow, they should complain directly to cpscsupport@umw.edu, which should result in action if enough response is received.

Zvezdan believes the reason the X-client “Sun Ray” boxes sometimes reboot in the B13 lab is that students are accidentally kicking out the physical cables. Ernie will look into this, and see if a better solution can be found.

None of the students present at the meeting (Robert and Sam) expressed any concerns or questions about the department.

The group decided that the new CPSC 270 course (special topics at the sophomore level) will have a variable credit count of 3-4 credits, will not count towards the major, and will have prereqs determined by the individual instructor on a semester-by-semester basis.

We discussed the rationale for making CPSC 350 (Databases and Data Mining) a 300-level course, and decided that it’s because we want our students to get this material earlier in the curriculum. Stephen will state such in the course proposal, and also mention the ACM curriculum guidelines and the alumni survey as factors in the decision.

CPSC 391 will be titled “Undergraduate Research” instead of “Individual Study,” as will the 400-level equivalent. It, too, will have a variable credit count, of 1-4 credits.

The group verbally approved the BS/MSMIS program proposal, and Ernie will move forward on this.

The group decided to remove the 321 prerequisite for CPSC 414 to give students more scheduling flexibility.

Finally, the group agreed to meet on October 10th at 12:30pm, and also on the 12th and 19th at the same time (if necessary) to discuss changes to the curriculum and the major.

The meeting adjourned at 5:10pm, without incident.

Action items:

• Stephen - find out when the GRE is next offered, and ask instructors of upper-division courses to inform their students of this.
• Stephen - arrange a meeting with David Dean and Tim Gajewski to figure out the programming contest. You may want to include our ITS, Patrick, as well. You should remind them that support for this conference is in our "Service Level Agreement."
• Stephen - find out the Friday schedule of classes so we can figure out when to move the PCs for the programming contest.
• Zvezdan - find out how many students need to take the MFAT this semester, and determine the time and place for the exam.
• Ernie - find out whether the loose cables that are presumably causing the "spontaneous SunRay reboot" problems can be made more secure.
• Stephen - draft full course proposal for CPSC 350, including rationale.