Council meeting minutes from 2023-02-27

minutes of the students' representative council for study programs of computer science

New Professors

We are visited by Prof. Tomohiro Nagashima today, who joined Saarland University recently. He specialises in Technology Enhanced Learning. We talked about the students council work, what we offer, and the upcoming events. Prof. Nagashima offers a block seminar already, and plans to do even more of them in the next years. We talked about the challenges of learning, especially in school, in the age of language assistants like ChatGPT and the abundance of technical devices. Prof. Nagashima used to work with students of age 10-18, but plans to expand his research to university level. For that he initialised contact to the InfoLab and wants to help out junior students.
We discussed about how to do good exams and how exams could be exchanged for other ways of grading. There could be a bigger focus on doing presentations or written reports.

Programming with Python

We met up with Prof. Rahmann after we had concerns with the exam in Programming with Python and other problems. The discussion was very productive, from the reports we got the exam was fair, and the only problem was that it was badly communicated. They also learned from the lecture, namely being that the lecture will be probably bioinformatics-exclusive.

Plagiarism

In our talk with Prof. Rahmann he told us that many people in his course were accused of plagiarism, as their plagiarism software went alert.

FSK

The FSK took place last week. Lukas gave us an update about the topics.
The Studierendenwerk is rather short on finance, some university buildings take a lot of energy. The future of the Semester-Ticket is that we will pay for our semesterticket as usual, but you can upgrade to have it be valid germany-wide. In future the student council elections will be held offline as the StuPa is of the opinion that online voting is undemocratic. The AStA will be checking their equipment soon.

Fachschaftseuro

In the semesterly fee contains ~13€ which go to the StuPa which maintains it. The students councils only benefits in very limited ways. The idea behind the Fachschaftseuro is that everybody pays 1€ per semester, which is paid with the semester fee. It took a lot of persuasion, but by now the Fachschaftseuro has been confirmed, but the regulations are not final yet. We can use the money in lots of ways, e.g. we can finance almost all of our social events with that. There are some expenses which are banned, e.g. tobacco or hard alocohol.

University open Day

There will be a huge Google-Drive-document where the faculty enters their preferences for their events. We should be present in high numbers on that day, e.g. our booth should have 3-4 people all the time.

StEP

The summer StEP is close by. The schedule is rather tight, as there is Easter. We currently plan to have the StEP at 11/04/2023. This collides with the opening ceremony, but Tanja Breinig offered us to put the welcoming ceremnoies into the time slots where we do not have schedule. We need to do start sketching our schedule. Ferdinand will push Progress. The Master StEP has similar scheduling issues. It is planned to take two days. The planning meeting will take place soon, after that we can give more information.

Game Night

The game night will take place on 10/03/2023. We will ask the FIS for drink funding again. There will be posters.

FIS-Meeting

The FIS main meeting will take place on 27/03/2023. It will be a great get-together with food, where the FIS will present what is going on.

Deans Lunch

The Deans Lunch was really productive and went very well. The protocol will be published at some time

Buddy Program 2.0

The buddy program was a support system for new international bachelor students to help them settle here. The international office has written us an email asking for help. We would like to help in general, but currently most of us are really busy. We will ask what they exactly want from us and ask them to also contact Prof. Hack if not done already.