January 28, 2014, Minutes of the Curriculum Committee Meeting

ECE Curriculum Committee Meeting Minutes for January 28, 2014

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, Hao Zhu

Attendees: Dallesasse, Hajek, Kudeki, Hajek, Kumar, Lumetta, Makela, Oelze, Raginsky, Schmitz, Smaragdis, Wasserman, Zhou

1. The minutes of January 21 were approved.

2. The proposal to change the prerequisite for ECE 462 Logic Design from CS 231 to CS 233 (CS discontinued CS 231 and replaced it  with CS 233) was approved.

3. A proposed policy for enforcement of the 2.25, aka junior eligibility, rule, was discussed.  There was a consensus that soft but uniform enforcement of the policy by the departmental advising office, which has access to complete student transcripts, is better than having individual instructors granting consent of instructor decisions for students near the 2.25 cutoff.  It was recommended that the proposed policy be implemented, possibly with some variation on the formula used to flag students with significant likelihood of not satisfying the rule.  Namely, the more 2.25 hours a student has yet to complete, the higher his/her 2.25 gpa should be in order to be able to take junior level ECE courses. Equivalently, zeros could be filled in for courses not yet take, possibly with a weighting factor.  It was pointed out that a complicating factor is that many students have much AP credit in math and physics, so the 2.25 average is determined by  a small number of courses.

4. The committee approved the concept of increasing the number of required laboratory courses from two to three, with a new requirement that at least one of the lab courses be taken from a subset of the lab courses that involve assembling and testing electronic components.   Some courses that would qualify as laboratory courses, but would not be on the sublist, are ECE 411, ECE 438, ECE 391, and ECE 420.    New options for required labs would be added such as ECE 311 and ECE 418.

5. The course goals for the revised version of ECE 110 (approved last week) were briefly reviewed.    The proposals for the revisions of ECE 110, ECE 385, and the EE curriculum will be going forward to the College within the next week.

6.  The meeting was adjourned at 3:50 p.m.

These minutes drafted by B. Hajek, January 28, 2014.