Summary of the Graduate Affairs Committee meeting Nov 15, 2012.

Present: Stephen Cook (GAC Chair), 
Steve Easterbrook, Nosayba El-Sayed (student member), Wayne Enright,
Celeste Esteves (Grad Office), Yashar Ganjali, Ken Jackson,
Allan Jepson (Grad Chair).

Regrets:  Vinod Vaikuntanathan

ITEM 1.  Departmental controls on admitting international students.

The issue is how to distribute the offers to new international
students across different faculty members while encouraging the
admission of new domestic students.

There are two questions:
a) how many international offers should the department allow to be made?
b) how should we distribute those offers around the different groups in
DCS?

For (a) we expect to have a guideline for the maximum number of new
international students that the department is hoping to have for
2013-14.  That target number is going to be around 12 to 15, and
will be based on the quota of international students in our
blended funding model (currently 66).

In the past, for (b) above, we asked for a maximum ratio
(2 to 3) between international and domestic offers by each
group.  However the policy of having a max ratio on the int/dom offers
(i.e., OFFERS alone) doesn't make much sense, even for bigger groups.
It seems to be fairer to use the int/dom ratio in the proposed
funded cohort of each specific research group to determine who is
allowed to make new international offers (and how many).

The committee agreed that something along the lines of the following
proposal should be adopted.

NOTE: Several of the details below were *not* discussed in the GAC, but
were fleshed out later.  They will be discussed in the Faculty
Meeting on Nov. 20.

Approvals for Offers of Admission

Each faculty member will be asked to predict which of their current students 
will be in the funded cohort in Sept 2013.  The supervisor will also
assign each of these students to a research group.  Similar to last year, 
financial predictions will also be needed, indicating how these continuing 
students will be funded and the availability of funds for newly admitted 
students.  We will need this information by early January.  

This information will be used to get an estimate, for each group and for 
the entire department, of the total number of continuing international 
and the total number of continuing domestic students who will be in 
the funded cohort next fall.
 
During the admissions process, research groups will make proposals for 
which students they want to admit.  These proposals will be approved based
on the following factors:
- Demonstrated ability to fund. 
- The expected number of funded int/dom students in the group next fall.
(Specifically, the expected ratio must be roughly one to two, or below.  
The expected ratio will be computed based on the number of offers and 
typical uptake rates for international and domestic offers.) 
- the ratio of the number of international offers to domestic 
offers by the group, which must be bounded above by one to one (say, 
or perhaps 4 to 3).  This larger acceptable for int/dom offers allows 
groups who currently have a relatively low ratio of (funded) int/dom 
students to slowly increase that ratio, if desired.

That is, the number of offers that a group makes must 
be a feasible solution to the ILP described above.

ITEM 2.  Proposal to add a research area, namely

Research Area 15: Computer Science in other Contexts (Title?)
Consisting of the courses:
CSC2602 Topics in Analysis and Computation in Continuous Models:
Computational Models of Climate Change

There are perhaps other courses that mignt fit here.

This proposal should be resolved soon, since CSC 2603 is being offered in the
spring term with Methodological breadth category M2, but without any
research area credit (so called RA0).  The instructor, Steve Easterbrook,
proposes that we give a separate research area credit for CSC2602
(listed above as RA15).  Giving the course formal research area credit
will make the course more attractive to students seeking a breadth
credit.

The committee could not resolve the following debate:

If we add such a research area, RA 15, this is seen to slightly weaken
the current breadth requirements away from the goal of requiring "core
CS".

vs

Who defines "core CS"?  Moreover, if CSC 2603 is not allowed to be
used for research area breadth credit, then we are starting down the
road to defining core vs non-core CS.  That is, core-CS courses are
those in which a student can get research area credit.

This should be brought before a faculty meeting.

NEXT MEETING:  Thursday, Dec 6.