Minutes/20120417
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Minutes from the computer science PhD programme council meeting April 17, 13.15-15
Present
- Magnus Burenius
- Erik Fransén
- Dilian Gurov
- David House
- Patric Jensfelt
- Karl Palmskog
1. Agenda and minutes
Nothing was added to the agenda. Karl was assigned to writing minutes.
2. Quality within the programme
Erik noted that it is necessary to defend the programme's quality to KTH and other stakeholders, and that the best way is to demonstrate an iterative improvement process.
One obvious aspect of quality is the quality of courses within the programme. Patric and David advocated evaluating courses with the help of questionnaires and discussions with students, resulting in a written course analysis.
Dilian emphasised that he would like to see a diversity of courses, and requirements both for students to take certain courses and for departments to give certain courses. Erik noted that CB prefers to have "exit requirements" rather than requiring certain courses; a student having taken some courses before should not have to take closely related courses again, but must take courses in other areas to achieve a "normalised" skill set.
Erik noted that Josephine Sullivan is taking over the programme-wide mandatory course on scientific method previously given by Stefan Arnborg.
Dilian noted the need to list courses with information on when they were given last and when they are planned to be given next. Erik pointed out that it may be beneficial to hide from view courses that will likely never be given again.
Dilian brought up the issue of quality factors for courses. Karl noted that one factor should be the experience and position of the course leader, i.e. a course led by a professor counts for more than a course led by a doctoral student. Patric noted that the quality of the course plan can also be a factor. Dilian noted that a course's relevance, e.g. that it fills a need in the overall curriculum, should be taken into account. He also noted the importance of new courses having clear requirements for students to pass.
Magnus pointed out that requirements for courses, such as providing a plan, are not really requirements when a course organiser can elect not to follow them without having the course shut down. Dilian stressed that because of the limited number of research level courses being organised at all, "requirements" are requirements in theory, but recommendations in practice. Karl and Patric noted that the doctoral programme can incentivise providing course plans by providing services such as templates for evaluation and course announcements.
Dilian noted that one good way of increasing the number of research-level courses is to have separate research-level course codes for selected advanced undergraduate courses. This would allow doctoral students to take those courses without having to compensate with other research-level courses to keep the percentage of the latter type of courses high. Karl noted that there is no obvious incentive for course leaders to do so. Erik pointed out that a new system of course funding that is being discussed could solve this problem.
The discussion turned to how to evaluate the quality of the work performed by students enrolled in the programme. David noted that supervision groups allow discussions on problems related to students that are not cut out for research studies, and that since supervisors may be hesistant to get into conflict, such problems may not be properly addressed otherwise.
Erik noted that it could be a good idea to require each department to organise discussions among supervisors. Patric pointed out that such discussions are hard to organise when there are many students and few faculty. One suggestions was to involve postdocs in the process. Erik suggested that seminars on topics such as how to pick an opponent and finding the appropriate level for a thesis is a good idea. Magnus noted that it would be good for students to have a written document of what can be expected from a supervisor, but Erik argued that it would be very hard to have everything written down.
Dilian noted that it would be desirable to examine the presentation ability of doctoral students, for which requiring a licentiate defense could be a good idea. It was noted that actually requiring licentiate for every student in the programme can have mixed results.
Dilian proposed to have a summary of the quality process on the doctoral programme website. Karl noted that this could be added when existing pages undergo revision during summer.
5. Other items, incl schedule for next meeting
Karl noted that it was necessary to plan for the next programme workshop during the summer, if it is to take place in the beginning of 2013. Dilian undertook to check up on budget restrictions and follow up on the workshop planning process during the summer.
Next meeting is planned to Tuesday August 21 13:15.
