Council meeting minutes from 2023-10-25

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

SE Lab

We have received multiple complaints about this years SE-Lab. Some of the participants visited the meeting and gave more specific Information. We collected all complaints in a shared document. You can still add complaints until November 03rd. The code was badly documented, and the reference for the students was inconsistent between the Group Phase and the Individual Phase. The specification was often unclear, the clarification were not organised well and needed to be searched up in the forum. The reference implementation was not correct at times, with won bug challenges not being officially communicated and the fixes not being shared to the students. The students think the workload was way too much for the given time and requirements. Reasons for this are e.g. contradicting answers in the forum or shifted deadlines leading to less time for the final deadline. The students reported that their peers suffered from sleeping or eating disorders during the time.
The rooms were partially not booked and the office hours did not match the building opening hours. This lead to an advantage for people situated within E1 3 and E1 1.
A mistake with given materials lead to an extended deadline, which is good. However there still is a final deadline which was not extended or otherwise accomodated, at least officially.
Success during the group phase is dependent on the group, and if the group is doing bad, singular students could fail without their own fault. Maybe some mechanism for students to pass despite that would be nice.
Students were thrown out of the office hours due to being sick. However there is no other way to obtain feedback.
We are going to ask the Chair for a discussion about the complaints and how to improve them for next year.

MfCS1

After we have contacted the Deans Office with our concerns about the MfCS1 course being an online-lecture. We have received an answer from the deans office and also from Prof. Weickert, whom we asked to have a personal discussion. Here are our main takeaways from it:
- Prof. Weickert knows about the importance and challenges of MfI1 and is taking it very seriously.
- The chair is putting a lot of effort into the course organisation, which means there is a lot of infrastructure for the students and the tutors.
- MfCS1 (the english lecture) and MfI1 are completely synchronised with free choice of lecture for the students
- Prof. Weickert is ill which does not allow for him to be in the lecture hall, the lecture is livestreamed into the lecture hall, with the assistant making sure that it is possible to ask questions etc.
- We both think that online-lecture is a misleading term that does not exactly describe the lecture.
Both sides were happy to have this meeting and are happy to establish a kind of contact. We are convinced that the lecture quality will be rather high despite the unusual mode of operation. We plan to schedule a meeting soon to ask him whether his plans were realistic. Feedback from the first lecture was rather positive.

Fundamentals of MAD

The study suggestion plan suggests for Fundamentals of MAD (media art and design) to be taken during the summer semester. However the last few years this course was offered during the winter semester, which leads to confusion among the new media-informatics students. If you want to take this course during the first semester, you need to register for it on 1st. of October. The responsible person to update the study plan accordingly would be the Dean of Studies. Anton W. will contact them.

StuPa

The StuPa (Studierendenparlament or Study Parliament) is a very powerful university institution which unfortunately is not very well known. Especially as the election turnout is usually below 20% it might be a good idea to make the StuPa more well-known.
We cannot advertise much as we are critical to advertise other university organs. However we think it is a good idea to discuss this topic with AStA and other Student Councils. Clemens will take effort into that. However the StuPa acts only in German, which is problematic for the many international students here at the CS Department.
Anton V. will invite Severin (StuPa member) to one of our meetings to discuss on how we can start with this topic.

Opening Hours

The opening hours of the CS-Building have extended, making lots of things easier. Most of the rooms can now be easily pushed open without card registration. The exception from this are the CIP-pools, where you still need to register. The opening hours can be seen on our website. Max and Alex will gather more Information about the CIP-Pool.

Breakfasts

Last week we had the StEP Breakfast. It went of without any hiccups.
For the next Breakfast we need to fix the date rather quickly as we have a sponsor and would like to tell them in time when it is.

Nikofete

Each year we offer a Nikofete/Winter Party, for which we need to fix a date quickly. We also have a sponsor. We should also start with planning with the organisation of Winter Party itself soon. Lukas, Max und Sophie will be in charge of organising the event. As usual, the Nikofete will be a charity event. If you have suggestions for charities, contact us

Torch Run

There are professors that have been called to another university. As per usual we would like to hold a torch run to demonstrate that we would like them to stay. Anton V. and Max will organise everything. Alex will contact the professors on their approval.

Advent of Code

Last year we hosted our own leaderboard for Advent of Code. It is a fun event in preparation for christmas where the organisers take a lot of effort into creating a nice story for connecting a few computer-science related problems. Lots of students and even some professors participated, so we wanted to repeat this event. Anton V. will ask Lukas on how to set this up.