Graduate School Survey Report (Preliminary)

Fall 2013

The first biennial graduate school survey was conducted this semester. The survey was sent to 17 people who are involved with computer science graduate schools at Bay Area universities.

Santa Clara

Ronald Danielson

Weijia Shang

Silvia Figueira

Ahmed Amer

UCSC

Arnav Jhala

Manfred Warmuth

Wang-Chiew Tan

USF

Dan Wolber

Terence Parr

Stanford

Dan Boneh

David Cheriton

UC Berkeley

David Culler

SFSU

Dragutin Petkovic

Barry Levine

SJSU

Cay Horstmann

Dan Harkey

CMU/SV

Todd Sedano

 

The data analysis from IEA can be found here.

Response Rate

The bad news is that only 3 out of 17 people responded to our survey. This, despite the fact that time was taken to identify people in these programs who were in the best position to respond to the survey (e.g., graduate coordinators) and I email confirmations were acquired from several people saying that they would respond to the survey. Does this say something about our relationship to neighboring CS departments, or did people just think the survey was a waste of their time?

The good news is that two of the three respondents had experience with 10 or more of our students in their programs. (No doubt one of the respondents was our own graduate coordinator.)

Recommendation

We should replace the survey with a different way of determining if our graduate program constituents want revisions in our BSCS program objectives. For example, we could ask faculty members with personal relationships with key members in other departments to gather the data informally through email exchanges or face to face. We could survey students in local graduate programs, perhaps enticing them with a cash prize if they complete the survey. We could also base any recommendation on a study of online catalogs from local programs.

Objectives

One of the respondents suggested the following program objective:

Ability to work effectively in team setting including globally distributed teams

Of course our alumni are supposed to have a similar quality upon graduation:

(d) An ability to function effectively on teams to accomplish a common goal

We might consider adding an objective about international collaborations. We do provide our students with these kinds of opportunities. But of course not all of our alumni will have international opportunities.

Respondents did indicate that attending conferences and belonging to professional organizations was important for graduate school success. In our September retreat no one had strong feelings about ACM or IEEE membership. According to our CS Club officers, our students are also pretty ambivalent about this.

Although not relevant to the review and revision of program objectives, two of the three respondents felt that our graduates were progressing toward their degrees (objective 1) at the same rate as other graduate students. (The third didn't know.)

Recommendation

The department should reconsider the importance of belonging to professional organizations. This could be done through the online forum. We could solicit the thoughts of an officer from the ACM. This semester I have been able to get free passes for our students to the C2SV and the Mobile CON conferences. Perhaps we need to have a more systematic way of getting students to attend local conferences.

Outcomes

The respondents felt that our graduates were average or above average on each of our 11 program outcomes, when compared to other graduate students.

Curriculum

Two of three respondents felt that CS155 would be an acceptable substitute for CS154. The third didn't respond.