CS 256 ASSESSMENT COORDINATION MEETING

January 12, 2011

MINUTES

Present: Nguyen, Raheja, Yang

Moderator: Soroka

This course was last assessed in February 2009 when the Course Outcomes were first composed.

The meeting began with an examination of the assessment materials collected since ABET’s visit. We are no longer collecting examples of student work for assessment folders, but the current sets of materials are quite adequate for assessment purposes.

Some instructors use Savitch (Absolute C++) and some use Gaddis. It’s ok for individual instructors to select the text they want.

Most students use Visual C++ although some students use other IDEs or the command line.

Instructors felt that they could not cover all of the topics in the Course Outcomes. Typically, exception handling and Standard Template Library are slighted.

Most instructors found fault with students’ preparation for CS 256. The current prerequisites are either CS 128 or CS 141. The first involves one course in programming and the second involves two courses in programming. The instructors agreed that almost all 256 students are coming from CS 141.

Nonetheless, students entering CS 256 are not very good programmers. They don’t have a good enough grasp of Java to enable the 256 instructor to teach imperative C++ in a short time. Students have weak debugging skills. Students don’t know how to modularize a program. Students lack problem-solving skills even if they know some Java language features. Soroka wondered whether we should defer teaching C++ until students have done more Java programming — say after 240 and 241.

We agreed to keep the current Course Outcomes but to allow the instructors to skip or skim topics as necessary. This may have repercussions on courses which expect students to know C++ better than CS 256 can provide.

Raheja suggests that the Department revisit its choice of first programming language. It may be easier to teach Java after C++ than C++ after Java. Students used to Java’s high-level approach have difficulty adjusting to the more detailed programming required by C++. It may be easier to go the other way.

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