CR: Third and Fourth Year

Misc. Ideas for required course changes

• COMP 3004: Split into two courses: a theory and a project course. Project course would be a community service project, organized into larger teams. Christine is working on it.
• COMP 3804: unchanged
• COMP 4905: Split into two semesters. First semester is a proposal course with a bit of research prep. Question: 2 0.5 credit courses?

Meta requirements

• We should prepare students adequately for industry and academia (depending upon student interest and abilities).
• Degree should provide breadth.

Mandatory objectives

Ideas for things that would apply to all students.

• Divide 4th year (full year) project into a design-based and a research-focused one. Students would choose which was suitable for them. Design projects would potentially be team-based.
• Adopt a breadth requirement for 3rd and 4th year similar to the TEAS requirements for MCS.
• Students should be "comfortable" working with large code bases, i.e., they should leave our program with sufficient confidence to dive into an arbitrary industry or open source code base.
• Students should have some facility with technical writing.
  • This one is potentially satisfied in part through a 1st or 2nd year technical writing course. We also want to have writing feature into courses throughout the degree, not just in the form of reports but also in shorter form, and potentially as part of team collaboration.

Optional objectives

Ideas for what to do with optional courses at 3rd and 4th year.

• Try to have courses that have only core course requirements.
• Courses should cover areas of CS, not be overly specialized.

ACM Areas Course breakdown

We went through the ACM 2008 Curriculum recommendations update and classified the courses by area as follows: