ECE Curriculum Committee Meeting Minutes for October 15, 2013
Members AY 2013-14: Tangul Basar, Mohamed Ali Belabbas, Deming Chen, John Dallesasse, Alejandro Dominguez-Garcia, Bruce Hajek (Chair), Pavan Kumar Hanumolu, Erhan Kudeki (Ex-Officio), Rakesh Kumar, Stephen Levinson, Daniel Liberzon, Yi Lu, Steven Lumetta, Jonathan Makela, Sayan Mitra, Michael Oelze, Maxim Raginsky, Elyse Rosenbaum, William Sanders (Ex-Officio), Paris Smaragdis, Venu Veeravalli, Daniel Wasserman
Attendees: Basar, Ali Belabbas, Chen, Dallesasse, Dominguez-Garcia, Hajek, Kudeki, Levinson, Liberson, Lumetta, Makela, Mitra, Oelze, Raginsky, Sanders, Schmitz, Veeravalli
1. The minutes of the meeting of October 8 were approved.
2. The committee voted to recommend that ECE comply with the request from the Department of Bioengineering to drop the ECE cross listing of Bio/ECE 414/415.
3. The committee discussed a draft departmental policy on prerequisites. There was general consensus that it is not a one size fits all problem. The problem is most severe in courses that have limited capacity, such as small laboratory courses in which each student needs use of a laboratory station. In such cases, students without the necessary background may enroll and block other students from registering and taking the course. In some other cases, the prerequisites are more for insuring a certain level of maturity, which is only roughly correlated with specific courses completed, and the instructor may feel it appropriate to consent to enrollment of students who haven't taken a specific prerequisite. Therefore, the proposed policy is to work to alert instructors in a timely manner about students enrolling without the advertised prerequisites, seeking the consent of the instructors for the enrollment. Some instructors may routinely request that prerequisites be strictly enforced for their course for all students. Erhan and Steve Lumetta will explore ways for Josh Potts (COE IT support) to use information from banner to help automate this process through the roster pages viewable on my.ece, in order to streamline the process. For courses outside of ECE, there was a consensus that the ECE department would treat the prerequisites as advisory.
4. The committee voted to recommend that all ECE mentors participate in mentoring James Scholars students, rather than having only a set of designated honors advisors mentor James Scholar students.
5. The meeting was adjourned at 1:50 p.m.
These minutes drafted by B. Hajek, October 15, 2013.