Week 6 Meeting Report

Kate Weston chaired the week 6 meeting, with UG4 and MSc student reps in attendance as well as Kendal Reid for the ITO and Mary Cryan as year 4 organiser. Items discussed included Innovative Learning Week, Personal Tutor group meetings and the National Student Survey as well as particular individual courses.

Innovative Learning Week
The reps reported that some of the ILW events had been very successful, notably the Smart Data Hack. Attendance at events had been mainly first- and second-year students: reps put this down to Honours and MSc students being too busy to attend.
Personal Tutor Group Meetings
James Hulme, School rep, expressed the opinion that PT group meetings were not useful for higher year students, as they simply passed on advice to lower year students. Other reps reported that some groups had never met: Youri Tan, fourth-year rep, for example, said he received no emails from his personal tutor about this.
National Student Survey
Kate Weston asked the reps for suggestions on how to encourage final-year students to complete the National Student Survey, as our response rate so far for this is very low. Reps suggested giving students a specific time set out complete it, as many might simply be putting it off owing to other more urgent tasks. They suggested this might have been done during the Personal Tutor group meetings.
Individual Courses

Agent-Based Systems Youri Tan reported students had experienced problems with the debugging tools provided for the assignment on this course, meaning it took over 30 hours to complete, far longer than expected.
Update: ABS lecturer Michael Rovatsos is seeking more details, and offered an additional supporting Q&A session

Informatics Research Proposal: Reps asked whether the final IRP deadline could be any later than 12th April. It was explained that all practical work must be complete by a certain time to ensure that students have revision time for their exams. One of the MSc reps reported timing problems with the first draft due only one week after tutorials had started. This had been raised at a previous meeting and the IRP organiser Victor Lavrenko has explained that this had been discussed at the opening lecture, but he would be changing the slides to make it more clear next year.

Robotics: Science and Systems: Students reported several weeks ago that feedback on the assignment had not been received; apparently this has still not been received. Students had also asked the lecturers for sample exam questions, as there are no previous exams; they have not received a response to this. Michael has already taken this up with the lecturers, but this needs pursuing further.

This entry was posted in Archived. Bookmark the permalink.