Council meeting minutes from 2023-06-28

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

Breakfast

The next breakfast was planned to take place on Friday, the 21st of July.
As the main organisers are not available on that day, we need to find somebody to organise it. Otherwise the breakfast might not take place.
We will reconsider it in the upcoming meeting.

Summer BBQ

The Summer BBQ will take place next week on Thursday.
We already have a preliminary shift plan. If you are not happy with your shifts, write Lukas.
On the day itself we need to be careful as there is a forest-fire warning due to the hot climate right now.
If you want to bring a salad, there is a google form under fsr.saarland/salad.
If you bring a salad, you will get some vouchers for free foody.
Lukas will visit different base lectures to promote the event.

Examination Boards

We think that not many people know how the examination boards work.
We consider writing an email to all students informing what their rights are, e.g. contacting us before filing a request to an examination board.

Game Night

Last Friday the Game Night took place.
It went really well, in future it would be great that council members could take a shift if they are present at the Game Night.
We consider to do the next Game Night already on the 21st or the 14th of July, or after the exam period. Manu will publish a Dudle for the date.

Schwenker

After the last usage, the Schwenker was dirty. The next time you take back the Schwenker, make sure it is clean. If not, make the lenders clean it. We also now have new equipment to clean it.

Bioinformatics-Conference

Last week we discussed the matter of sending someone to the Bioinformatics Conference to connect with other Bioinformatics councils in Germany.

The best person to go to the Bioinformatics Conference would be Manuel, as he is the person currently taking the most Bioinformatics lectures. We would need to gather information on the state of the study programme. Or we search for Bioinformatics students to go there, as they know the problems in more detail. Unfortunately we could not vote on whom to send.

Cryptography

The Cryptography mid-term was suboptimal and many people complained about it.

We had a discussion with Prof. Joux and Prof. Loss about this.
These are our main takeaways from the meeting:

=== Begin Protocol ===

- The lecturers argued that lecture recordings will harm the students and do prevent discussions during the lecture since fewer students attend the lecture. Prof. Loss said that he doesn’t see any advantages in doing recordings.

- Prof. Joux pointed out that his assignment sheets are not meant to prepare for the mid/final-exam and are just additional information for the students. Prof. Loss argued that there is no reason for changing that as it is not illegal.

- The lecturers think that the exercise 1 a) of the mid-term was doable even though the cipher text was written in Latin. They argued that a brute force attack leads to a solution quickly and said that their TA’s hadn’t had any problem with this exercise. They also argued that exercise 1 b) was quickly solvable.

- Prof. Joux pointed out that he removed many technical definitions and puts his focus on teaching the intuition. He said that many students asked for a less mathematical lecture.

- The lecturer agreed to review the assignment sheets again to make sure that the new content of the lecture fits better to the assignment.

- Prof. Joux explained that he also uses the black board during the lecture, hence the slides do not contain all necessary information. He and Prof. Loss encourages the students to take notes or audio recordings during the lecture.

- The lecturers pointed out that they are primarily concerned with the students that attend the lecture in-person, and they do think that they are doing a good job since (according the their observation) the number students who regularly attend the lecture is stable and the students ask lots of questions/discussions during the lecture. The lecturers enjoy the lecture, and they encourage all students to attend the lecture.

- The lecturers said that the TA’s of the lecture have weekly meetings with the tutors.

- The lecturers will try to may get a second lecture hall for the second midterm. However, they are unsure whether it will work out.

=== End of Protocol ===

We are not happy with the results of the discussion, and although we can understand some of his points, we do not think the they are well implemented. We consider to bring our problems with this course up to the dean of studies, as it is a mandatory course for the Cybersecurity programme. We will vote on the matter via our internal mailing list.