Minutes of The Graduate Affairs Committee meeting on Nov 28, 2014

Present: Jacqueline Bermudez, Mike Brudno,  Christina Christara,
Ken Jackson, Allan Jepson (Assoc Chair, Grad), Peter Marbach,
Bogdan Simion, Ioan Stefanovic

Regrets:  Stephen Cook (Chair)

Item 1.  Student workload in graduate courses.

a) There wasn't significant concern about the variation of workload across courses.  The common expectation is that a grad student working full time can only expect to take two courses in one term, plus TA.  

It was noted that two courses, a TA-ship, plus the MScAC required course(s) is a high workload for MScAC students. MScAC students should be warned about the extra workload of TAing.  

In general it is important to provide more feedback to students on what to expect of workloads in various grad courses, in addition to various TA assignments.

b) The committee emphasized that the one-term time limit on grad courses is an important departmental priority as it has impact on time to completion, and it should therefore be properly enforced.  That is, course work must not extend into the next term (other than in exceptional cases, such as an illness).  Specifically, course projects must be scheduled so that students complete all their course work within one term.

Currently the consequence to the instructor for running a course over two terms is that the instructor receives nagging email from the Grad Office and the Associate Chair.  This can be ineffective.

Various means of strengthening the enforcement were discussed, including:
- clearly informing DCS students about DCS's and SGS's expectations that all course work is completed within the one term;
- the Assoc. Chair escalates the nag mail to the Chair;
- the Assoc. Chair reports courses in which most students receive late marks for consideration at PTR time;
- the Assoc. Chair informs the supervisors of the students in such courses (since the extra time the students spend on such a course may be detrimental to their other responsibilities);
- inform DCS students and faculty of situations for which the one-term time constraint is violated by a substantial number of students in the course;
- require that an offending course be listed in the future as a two-term Y course worth half a credit. (The advantage would be that students who are considering this course are warned by the Y listing.  The disadvantage would be that the instructor may be encouraged to increase the work required by the course.  This disadvantage was felt to be more significant, and this option was not recommended.)

Item 2.  Faculty teaching credits for graduate courses.

a) A cross-listed course may be counted as a UG teaching credit if, in recent offerings, the undergrad enrollment was above a threshold number.  The instructor of a course with a history of strong grad and undergrad enrollments could choose which type of teaching credit they would prefer to have (although definitely not both).  The actual value of the UG threshold wasn't discussed.  

b) Graduate courses which have only one or two students enrolled by the end of the second week of classes are to be considered reading courses (for the purpose of a teaching credit for the instructor).  That is, they count for PTR but they do not count for the instructor's graduate teaching credit.  An exception may need to be made for courses that typically have more than two students, but which fail to meet this in an isolated year.  (It was implicit that the breadth classification of the course would not depend on the number of students enrolled.)

Item 3.  Survey results on grad courses.

a) It was not recommended that courses from other departments be considered for DCS breadth.  At least two reasons were cited for this: a) the expected variability of the course content; and b) the looseness of our current breadth requirements.  The dissenting view was that many relevant courses are offered in other departments, especially in cognate disciplines such as ECE.

b) No additional grad course related items were raised.

The issue of using grants to fund entrance scholarships was left for the next meeting.

AJ