Course evaluation
April 2014
Final course evaluation meeting for AFP (Chalmers TDA342 / GU DIT260)
2014-04-28 12:00 - 13:00 in the room EDIT-8103.
You're welcome to bring your lunch to the meeting.
How to find EDIT-8103: It is on the top floor of the EDIT-building: enter from Rännvägen 6B, take the elevator to floor 6, walk north through half of the corridor until you reach the stairs, follow them up one floor and turn left. EDIT-8103 is next to the CSE dept. lunch room.)
Notes by Peter Damaschke
ATTENDING:
Patrik Jansson (course responsible)
Peter Damaschke (program director CSALL)
Karl Bristav, Daniel Eddeland, Daniel Oom (student representatives)
SUMMARY
Excellent course with an overall score of 4.7.
The course is considered hard yet adequate.
GOALS
Most students were aware of the learning outcomes.
REALIZATION
Good comments on the lectures, assignments, and opportunities to get help.
The lab PMs are long, but also clear about the requirements for grades.
STUDY CLIMATE
The work of the teaching team was much appreciated.
CHANGES
More time can be devoted to the labs and the first lectures. (Functional
programming is difficult for students being not yet so familiar with the
concept.)
The 3rd lab is important for the teaching goals (modification of existing
code), but more guidance for choosing the package could be given early in
an exercise session.
Expand on QuickCheck.
Explain the group structure of the exercise sessions beforehand.
Modified prerequisites in the course plan?
The Google group should be kept.
February 2014
AFP student representatives 2014: K. Bristav (CID=karlbr), D. Eddeland (danedd), A. Gufler (gufler), F. Levenstam (lfilip), D. Oom (lalti). They can be reached by CID@student.chalmers.se.
The first brief meeting was on Monday 2014-01-27, 15.00-15.15 and the mid-course evaluation meeting was on Thursday 2014-02-06 12.00-12.45. The final evaluation meeting will be in April (prel. 2014-04-28, 12.00-13.00).
Notes from 2014-02-06: Present: Patrik, Bristav, Eddeland, Levenstam, Oom.
- Good lectures, interesting material.
- Some more clear on-line representation of the "dynamics" of the lectures would be appreciated. (White-board pictures, lecture audio or video, lecture notes.)
- Good that the lecturer asks questions during the lectures. Even when nobody answers it gives som time for reflection and deeper thought.
- Good that the lecturer goes around asking individual questions in the breaks. This leads to a good contact between the lecturer and the students.
- Labs are working fine. We had some discussion about pros and cons of the "half-lab" deadlines. They were introduced a number of years ago (on request from the students) to make sure they start working early enough.
- The course position in the curriculum (all the representatives are taking the CS-ALL (MPALG) programme): most students think study period 3 (SP3) is too densly packed compared to SP2. One concrete suggestion would be to move Programming Language Technology (PLT) from SP3 to SP2.
- Administration and support systems: Fire has some problems (not yet in this course), the new course evaluation system (from Autumn 2013) has some problems. In general the students would like to see more Open Source solutions for admin. systems.
Central information:
"Being a student representative means that you are responsible for evaluating the course together with the examiner/course responsible and the program board of the program that gives the course. The evaluation process consists of three parts:
- The student representatives and the examiner/course responsible are to have two informal meetings during the course. The first one should be in the second study week, the second one after approximately half the course. The first meeting is mostly for you to get acquainted, the second one is for the student representatives to give feedback to the teacher on the progress of the course.
- After the course an evaluation questionnaire is sent out. The examiner will get an opportunity to add extra questions to the standard questionnaire.
- After the course, in the middle of the next study period, there will be an evaluation meeting where the student representatives and the examiner/course responsible for the course meet the program board of the program who gives the course, discussing the course’s advantages and potential for improvement.
For participating in the final evaluation meeting the student representatives and the study committee representative get a gift certificate of 200 SEK valid at Cremona."
April 2013
Final course evaluation meeting for (Chalmers TDA342 / GU DIT260)
2013-04-22 12:00 - 13:00 in the room EDIT-8103.
The
final evaluation meeting notes 2013.
February 2013
AFP student representatives 2013: V Nilsson (CID=vikni), D Olausson (danola), P Crona (cpeter), J Jarmar (@GU).
First brief meeting was on Monday 2013-01-28 at 15.00-15.15 and the mid-course evaluation meeting waw on Monday 2013-02-11 15.00-15.45.
April 2012
Final course evaluation meeting for (Chalmers TDA342 / GU DIT260)
The
final evaluation meeting notes.
February 2012
Mid-course evaluation meeting for (Chalmers TDA342 / GU DIT260)
Advanced Functional Programming (7.5 hec), Spring 2012
The evaluation meeting took place on Monday 2012-02-13.
Participants: Patrik Jansson (lecturer and examiner) and five student
representatives: J Kallus, P Reimers, N Tall, L Tidstam, N Ulvinge.
Lectures: really good - nice mix of slides, white-board and "live
coding". Screen-cast recording would be appreciated - Patrik will experiment
with it (check with Dave Sands who uses it effectively).
Labs: difficult tasks, sometimes hard to know what to do, but that
gives them a "real life" flavour. Recommended reading (like for the
lectures) would be much appreciated. Patrik will try to do that (by
next year - it is too late now).
Grading: The final grade of the course is a based on a weighted average of
the lab grade and the exam grade (provided that both are at least "Pass"). The weights are the number of
credits: 4.5cr (60%) for the labs and 3cr (40%) for the exam. The three
lab assignments are weighted roughly 3 to 5 to 4 - thus more weight for the
second assignment. Patrik has made this description available on the course homepage / course memo.
Prerequisites: It feels like there is a gap between the previous FP
course and AFP. A suggestion is to make the previous course a little
more demanding (not to make AFP less so). This does not apply to the
D1 FP course, but to the third-year version.
General comments: Well organised, demanding course with good
lectures and interesting labs.
January 2012
The first course evaluation meeting for (Chalmers TDA342 / GU DIT260)
Advanced Functional Programming (7.5 hec), Spring 2012
The first meeting took place on Monday 2012-01-16, in connection with the first lecture. The course representatives were confirmed (J Kallus, N Tall, L Tidstam, P Reimers, N Ulvinge), the process described and the mid-course evaluation meeting was booked for Monday 2012-02-13 (we meet at 12.00 in the queue for "Café Linsen").
April 2011
Final course evaluation meeting for the 2011 instance of (Chalmers TDA342 / GU DIT260)
The final evaluation meeting was in April,
notes are in the document repository and
linked from the 2010/2011 instance of the course in the student portal.
February 2011
Course evaluation meeting for (Chalmers TDA342 / GU DIT260)
Advanced Functional Programming (7.5 hec), Spring 2011
The evaluation meeting took place on Friday 2011-02-11.
1 Introduction round
- Patrik Jansson, lecturer and examiner
- Jean-Philippe Bernardy: course assistant and guest lecturer
- Shayan, Tobias, Gabriel: student representatives from the CSALL MSc programme
2 Changes in the course since last year
- Real World Haskell book (system level perspective)
- New course plan (to match the contents)
3 Study climate (communication, work load, supervision).
- Shayan: The most important part [of the course] is the labs. There were some problems with the documentation of WX Haskell. Talked with BSc students: satisfied, good that a large focus is on the labs. Programming exam on paper is awkward. Should have 70% weight on the labs.
- Patrik: The final grade is based on a weighting (60% lab + 40% exam) + minor adjustments.
- JPB: The exam is partly just to check that you did your part in the lab group.
- Shayan: In the ProgPara course John recorded a screen-cast + sound which was useful to replay off-line. Feedback from MSc level FP course was in favour.
- Gabriel: Lab 1 was unclear what to do for different grades. Make sure to add a "warning" early in the lab text (because many other courses don't have graded labs). Would like to move one Office hour to Mondays.
- Patrik: We could move one of the meetings to after the Monday lecture.
- Gabriel: Will there be any guest lectures?
- Patrik: Yes, Emil Axelsson will talk about DSL design and implementation on Monday (the Feldspar project) and later in the course Nils Anders Danielsson will talk about Programming with dependent types (an Agda tutorial)
4 Problematic course items; can resources be used better?
The graphics in the lab could be done with Gtk or even just generate the SVG.
5 Course-specific questions in questionnaire; other material for final meeting
- Would you like to have the lectures recorded (screencast + sounds or so)?
- Do you want more or less "live coding" (compared to beamer presentations / black-board)?
Notes by Patrik Jansson, 2011-02-11
For reference:
Responsibilities of the student representatives
As a student representative it is your responsibility to
- inform yourself about the views of your fellow students.
- pass these on together with your own views in the meetings.
- suggest course-specific questions, if needed.
- inform your fellow students about discussions and recommendations at the meetings.
When the course evaluation has been completed, each student representative will get a voucher, valid for 200 kronor at Cremona