From owner-cse191-sp08-list@LISTSERV.BUFFALO.EDU Mon Mar 10 09:40:12 2008 Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 09:39:51 -0400 From: "William J. Rapaport" Subject: 191: MIDSEMESTER COURSE EVALUATION SUMMARY To: CSE191-SP08-LIST@LISTSERV.BUFFALO.EDU ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Subject: MIDSEMESTER COURSE EVALUATION SUMMARY ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Thank you for your comments on the midsemester course evaluation. I received 31 responses (out of a possible 80 or so), so please take expressions like "some", "most", or "many", below, with a grain of salt. If others would like to add their comments, please feel free. Here are my responses to what you've told me. Recitations: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ As I might have expected, you were about evenly split between those of you who found recitations useful (despite some problems with them) and those who found them a waste of time. The idea behind a recitation is to break a large, primarily-lecture class into smaller groups where there can be more discussion and more practice with examples. Don't forget, a typical secondary-school class meets 5 times a week for about 3-4 hours total per week; a typical college class meets 2 or 3 times a week for 2.5 hours total per week. Adding a recitation gives you one more meeting and brings the "contact" hours a bit closer to the secondary-school standard. Of course, one of the main differences between high school and college is that in college you're expected to do a lot more of the learning yourself. Happily, from your responses, it appears that many of you are aware of this. Other "paradoxical" reactions to the recitations in general include that you'd like them to be longer and you'd like them to be shorter (so I guess they're just right), and you'd like to have fewer quizzes and you'd like to have more quizzes (you'll have more :-)--they'll make up for low HW grades). Other issues are TA-specific, and I won't discuss them here. But I will review your comments with the TAs, and I will try to help them a bit more with their teaching (including observing them teach a recitation, so don't be surprised if you see me there sometime soon). All 3 of us are aware of the language problem, and I'll try to work with them on that, too. Don't be too harsh with your TAs (in any course!) if they seem nervous or unsure of themselves; imagine if I asked *you* to teach a class when you may never have taught before! And don't be too harsh on them if they make a mistake; we all do that. For what it's worth, the TAs are not working in a vacuum: I meet with them weekly to review what's going on in recitation, I suggest things for them to cover, and I help them with their "lesson plans". Lecture (& course in general): ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The largest number of comments (about 33%) concerned the length of the midterm exam. I have already discussed this in previous postings: http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/191/S08/EMAIL/20080303-MidTermExam http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/191/S08/EMAIL/20080304-MidTermExamStats Therefore, I won't revisit it except to remind you that (1) if you do better on the final exam than you did on the midterm, then your grade on the midterm won't count, and (2) there won't be any more in-class exams. (But I'll keep in mind for the next time I teach this course that if the exam takes *me* 10 minutes to do, I need to multiply that by at least 6 to get a better estimate of how long it will take the students to do it!) The next largest number of comments (about 25%) were that you seem happy with my lectures and teaching style, and the explanations that I give. Great! Thanks! The things that you'd like to see changed include: * spend more time on proofs spend less time on proofs We'll be doing lots more proofs as the semester goes on. It's very difficult to teach how to do proofs in the abstract, independent of any particular subject matter. I've shown you some of the general strategies, and as we do more proofs, I'll emphasize that strategic approach. * slow down go faster/pick up the pace I agree that I'm going slower than I had originally planned to. I still think I'll be able to cover most of what I had originally planned. There's no engraved-in-stone set of topics for this course, and there's no sequel being taught by someone else who will be expecting me to get to a certain point by the end of the semester. So I'm somewhat free to go at a pace that seems right to me. Before the semester began, I polled my faculty colleagues to ask them which topics from 191 they thought were most important. Although for each topic, there was at least one professor who thought it was important (now there's a nice proposition to represent in FOPL!), the topics that got the strongest support were logic, sets, functions, relations, and recursion. So, if that's all I get to do, most of us will be happy. You'll see graphs and trees again in various programming and data structure courses (but I do expect to cover them; I'm not dropping them from the syllabus). There's another issue, which holds true for pretty much any introductory course: Should the emphasis be on breadth: covering as many topics as possible so that the students get a good overview of the subject? Or should the emphasis be on depth: covering a few important topics in enough detail or with enough practice that the students can master them, and then they will have the appropriate skills for learning the other material on their own on an as-needed basis? Although some middle-ground approach is probably best, if I'm going to err, I'd rather err on the side of giving you the basic skills and foundational material you'll need in order to learn the other material. You've learned (or begun to learn) a formal language, not unlike a programming language, for expressing (and proving) mathematical & computational propositions as precisely as possible, and you've learned about the main data type: sets, in terms of which all other mathematical and computational objects can be defined. Now we're going to use that language and those objects to enable able to go fairly efficiently through the remaining topics. * A few of you complained that I seem to be assuming that you know everything already. It's hard for an instructor to know what to assume and what not to assume. What I *am* assuming is that (1) most of you were pretty good in math in school before coming here (else you wouldn't be majoring in CSE--yes, I know that some of you aren't, but most of you are, and that's whom this course is designed for), (2) you know a bit about high-level programming languages (at least from CSE 115), and (3) you know some basic arithmetic and algebra, all of which means that you've probably seen things like truth tables and sets before, even if you haven't studied them in quite the way we are in this course. If those assumptions are wrong, you should come see me. * My late policy for HWs still seems to be bothering some of you, but I'm not sure if that's leftover frustration at my being very strict at the beginning of the semester or if you think you're still having problems. As far as I know, no one has had a late HW rejected recently. As for the due day of HW--Fridays--only one person complained, but didn't explain why. I don't think that there's any one particular day that's better or worse in general. In part, it depends on when your recitation section meets relative to when the HW is assigned and when it's due. If anyone has a good argument why we should switch to another day, I'm willing to listen to it. But you do seem happy with the regularity of the HWs. * Some of you think the class meets too early. So do I, but it could be worse, and math is better done in the mornings anyway. More importantly, neither I nor the CSE department has very much control over when our courses are offered (that's a very computationally difficult "constraint-satisfaction" problem that the entire university has to solve every semester). Nor do we have much control over the length of a class hour (it's 50 minutes, unless the class meets on Tue/Thu, in which case it's 75 minutes; there are advantages and disadvantages: I think for a 100-level course such as this, it's better to meet more frequently than for a longer time). The things you like include: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ * The course website and the Listserv (well, not all of you like them). I welcome more discussion about the course material on the Listserv. * The examples given in lecture, and the discussion of how discrete math is relevant to CS. * The topics and content of the course. * How I lecture and answer questions (thanks). One of you liked my lectures so much that you said you learned all the material from them. Thanks, but fair warning: I don't cover everything in lectures that you need to know. I do expect you to be reading, studying, and practicing the material in the Rosen text and making use of the copious online material at its website. Some material that is important and that will appear on HWs and potentially on the final exam may come from the text and **not** from lecture. My job is to supplement the text, not to supplant it. (And the text's job is to supplement my lectures; so, you won't get the complete course if you only pay attention to the text XOR me.) * My grading methods. Again, not all of you are happy; in fact, one of you said, paradoxically, that you didn't like my grading system but did like the distribution of grades :-) Hmmm, let's see: if I change the grading system to make you happy, then the grade distribution will change, which will make you unhappy... For more information on my grading method, read "How I Grade" at http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/howigrade.html or read a draft of a paper I'm writing on the subject at http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/Papers/grading.pdf I would appreciate any feedback from you on this, either in person during office hours, or online via the Listserv.