...
- Students who already have good debugging skills spend ~10 hours/week; students with little prior design/debugging experience spend 2-3X that.
- Many students postpone 385 until their last semester, opening up a gulf of seven semesters between the end of 120 and the beginning of 385.
- Another issue about not being in lab during CoVID is that students don't have other students who have had the same problem (and solved it) sitting around nearby.
- Comment from the committee on the difference between fact and perception: among our CE + EE graduates, grades in 385 are the same on average, and overall are better than similar-level courses (like 313...by about 0.5 grade points). It isn't the material is tough as much as the workload is heavy. Here is the HKN advice-for-students report on ECE 385: ECE 385 - Digital Systems Laboratory
Dr. Cheng has responded by (1) adding an MP that reminds students of what they learned in 120, (2) removing one MP, and merging two others, to reduce total number of MPs by one. Two further suggestions came from the committee: (3) maybe you should ask them how long each lab took (quantized), sanitize the results a bit, and then publish them for the students to see? (4) have you / would you consider having project teams of 3-4 people instead of 2? There are management issues to consider when dealing with larger groups, but other courses are addressing and solving some of those issues, e.g., ECE110 is now teaching students to think about how teams function and they produce a team "charter" in week#2 where they speak openly about issues that can occur during a project. They document plans on how to address issues as soon as they start to appear. It seems this is having some level of success.
The Curriculum Committee then discussed two possible future steps.
...