Subject: CSE 501: New Attendance Policy--Comment: 201009_027374 From: "William J. Rapaport" Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2010 19:41:24 -0400 (EDT) To: "201009_027374":; A student writes: Don't you think it's better to take attendance on the more important lectures/presentations like the one on LaTeX and emacs. I think skipping attendance all of a sudden on all the lectures will destroy the whole point of the course. Reply: I considered that, but the department in the past has been quite serious about requiring grads to attend colloquia. The student comments: And I've always thought that this was a good course, in most parts. I mean I really don't understand the department colloquia part, most of the presentations are way too advanced, the accents too hard for me to really understand anything. I only found the one in the Clemens Hall interesting. This is one of the problems with the course. So presentations are way too advanced and are of little or no importance to MOST of us. It'd be helpful if you made attendance optional on these lectures. But this is not the main problem with the course... Reply: There is always a great deal of variation in quality for colloquia. I thought that Barry Smith's was well presented if a bit skimpy on details, Li's was much better though assumed a lot of prior knowledge on the part of the audience, and Fujiwara's was an excellent example of a bad talk :-) At the very least, you should take away from these talks lessons in how (not) to give talks. And please keep in mind that almost all of you *will* be giving such talks, in your classes, your seminars, and at work. In most cases, you should be able to get at least a little bit out of the beginnings of the talks on the current state of research in the subject area. The Distinguished Speaker talks later this semester and next semester will be far superior, because these will be distinguished speakers who know how to give interesting presentations. The student continues: I liked the whole idea of a "501 course at UB". I think the heart of the problem lies in the S/U grading. That simply doesn't make it a course in our minds. No one among us takes 501 seriously as a course. With all due respect, it's more like a joke. It's like a filler, like a cushion to lessen your workload. (I hope I'm not being too harsh, I just want to help :( ) Reply: Well, that's the way we designed it: to be a cushion to lessen your workload! All you have to do is show up. Sigh. The student continues: And it's good in that, but I'd like to suggest making this course useful by ACTUALLY MAKING IT A FULL FLEDGED COURSE. A fully graded course at that. You could still make it work, by taking attendance only for those lectures which are useful like LaTeX and emacs. Those are the things I really wanted to learn with 501, still want to learn but I haven't. If you'd give full grades for that and maybe (relatively)simple assignments on say these things that'd be really useful, it would've been great. I'd actually get something out of this course. I'd get to learn everything that I wanted to learn and the course would still be relatively easy and interesting. If you changed all the courses in the Computer Science department to an S/U graded courses, how many people do you think will behave in the class? How many do you think will earnestly come for each and every lecture and study whats being taught? I'd say all the other courses will fare JUST AS POORLY no matter how fancy their name. I think the whole purpose of School and College is to help the lazy ones. And I think there are a lot of us. Reply: Yes, we've considered that, and in its earlier incarnations it was that. But that was when the first-year class had only about 30 students. There are now 144 of you. It's impossible to make this a real course with real work for a grade without more input from more faculty (I don't know emacs, so wouldn't be able to design a unit on that, for instance) and without some TA assistance for grading, etc. In addition, there's the scheduling problem that the only time the course can be held is TTh 3:30-4:50, which is when we normally have faculty meetings and colloquia, so there are no other CSE classes. But then, of course, colloquia get scheduled as part of 501. It's an interesting constraint-satisfaction problem! The student continues: We always talk about the usefulness of a course, and even if a course is hard I usually don't mind it if I learn stuff. 501 is not so useful to me right now. All I've learnt from this course is that : 1. LaTeX is a language 2. Emacs is cool. I should check it out sometime instead of stickign with my VIM. Reply: That's all we can hope to do. The student continues: It could've been so much more if you gave us assignments and small projects. That's always there in my mind "it could've been so much more.." We are students and mortals. The grades are a huge part of what motivates us to study for a course. Of course we like Computer Science that's why we are here but that doesn't mean that we'll always be ready to give up our sweet free time for studies all the time. Reply: I understand that, but, on the other hand, and speaking only as a faculty member far removed from my student days, you are grad students, not undergrads. We faculty, belive it or not, consider you to be junior colleagues, not mere students who are only here to get a degree and leave. Professional computer scientists can have the same complaints about poor colloquia, but are expected to attend anyway. The student continues: And the way 501 is configured right now, it doesn't really demand a lot of respect and usefulness. I think removing the attendance on all lectures and maintaining an S/U grade is a definite step down for this course. I wouldn't want this course to be dropped from the next years because that's what it looks like. I'd hate to see that happen because this is the course where I imagined I'd learn all that I had to about Computer Science in general. Reply: It won't be dropped. We're discussing its future implementations right now. All of your (and others') recommendations and ideas are very valuable, and we thank you for them. The student continues: I'm extremely sorry if I'm being offensive in this mail. I just wanted to let you know what I think. And I just wanted to try my best to help you and this course. I honestly still think 501 is a good idea but that it could've been done better. PS : And the sad part is I know I'll never make time to learn LaTeX. I know I'll (probably) never check out emacs. I hope you understand my frustration Reply: No offense taken! PS: Learn LaTeX! :-) Let me tell you my story: When I first got here, many many years ago, I was an expert in using the then-currently-popular document preparation system: ditroff. I couldn't figure out why anyone would want to use LaTeX, until I needed to use a lot of logical and math symbols, for which LaTeX was the system of choice. I took the time to learn it and never looked back. Even now, when I am occasionally required to use Word for a journal article, I create it in LaTeX, where I have complete control, then use latex2rtf to convert it to a Word-readable document. On the other hand, I was also, and am still, quite fluent in "vi" (ancestor of "vim"). I couldn't figure out why anyone would want to use emacs, until I was told that the killer app for emacs was the ability to run Lisp code in one emacs window while preparing a document in another Emacs window. But I haven't programmed in Lisp in a long time, so I decided that that wasn't killer enough of an app for me. I still use vi, not emacs. But I do know that a programmer who is not already committed to a favorite doc prep system should be using emacs, because of its many advantages of the kind that Mike Prentice tried to exhibit.