Assessment, Assignments, and Experiences

To master the materials in different kinds of CS courses, students need a combination of experiences (lectures, readings, homework, projects, discussions), and the outcomes of these need to be assessed (assignment grading, tests, portfolios, projects, conferences). Each group will pick one of the following kinds of course and discuss the following:

• What are the learning goals of the course, i.e., what are the 4 or 5 things a student should be able to do after completing the course?
• What sort of work is appropriate for the learning goals of the course? (Homework exercises, medium-length projects, longer term projects, tests, presentations, reports, demos, portfolios, ???)
• How do you assess the quality of the student's work? What if some of the work is done in groups instead of individually? Does that change anything?
• Does performance on some kinds of work tell you more or less about student mastery of the subject (homework vs projects vs tests, for example)?
• How should these assessments be factored into student grades?

You should specifically discuss both traditional experiences and assessments, and also propose some novel, non-traditional ways that the learning goals of the course could be achieved, or even propose different kinds of courses than the ones suggested here that would more effectively educate CSE students.

A. Introductory courses (typically intro programming courses)

B. Junior-senior level courses involving significant projects (networks, databases, compilers, operating systems, etc.)

C. Theoretical/analytic courses (discrete math, formal languages & automata, complexity theory, etc.)

D. Capstone courses (Full-term project courses that involve synthesis across multiple subjects instead of a single identified topic; typically involving building a large project or artifact.)