Council meeting minutes from 2024-10-16

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

Schülerinformationstag: find people and another responsible person

We are having another Schülerinformationstag.
Before this meeting our volunteers were:
Jenny, Manuel, Simon, Mona, Lizzie and maybe Alex.
Additionally we also now have Daniel B. volunteering.
Manuel is in charge physically, while Anton does the metaphysical work.

Simon Döring volunteers to bring his optical illusions based on diffusion models

Rentals: user manual

Jan-Philipp has made some manuals for our rental-stuff.
He presented the Gastrobert-Manual.
Lukas and Ferdinand volunteered to take a look at the Gastrobert-Manual.

Rentals, again: new rental contracts

Lukas presents the new rental contracts.
This is a return of an earlier topic, where he asked for comments.
He tried to print it, but the toner-ghosts were not kind.
He will try again.
When we switch to the new contract, Lukas proposes to shred all contracts older than 2023.
Manuel wants to know if the new contract is on the wiki.
Lukas doesn't know, but will put it there soon(tm).

TaskForces: New task force Phicility management

Jan-Philipp did some repairs around the student council (Armrests are now working again).

There were no concerns about the new Taskforce.

When asked about the role of the Taskforce, founding director Jan-Philipp put it as: Fix and maintain stuff around here, a noble effort which was lauded by present members.

MensaBar: information about Mensabar project

Lukas reports on the MensaBar-Project.
He was present for a call with both Asta and the Studierendenwerk about the MensaBar, a weekly event held in the "Forum International", formerly known as Canossa.

The MensaBar will start in November (current plan is starting at the 20th from 5pm to 10pm, recurring every Wednesday), with a dedicated Tutor position.

There will be some advertising created soon, we will try to advertise it both physically and via our socials.

Concerns about "Programming with Python"

Bioinformatics students were having some concerns about the Programming with python exam, as there were a large number of failed exams compared to the number of people taking the exam.

One complaint was that there was a expectation of requiring prior knowledge in programming, which is bad for those with a biology background.

There was also a complaint about missing information on which task gives how many points.

A student suggestion was a bootcamp prior to the summer semester as a help for those who are joining without a cs-background.

The re-exam was considered harder and didn't have a points allocation, while the main-exam had an allocation.
A concern on content was with the theory focus and general exam difficulty compared with the exercise sheets.

Manuel (known Rahmann affiliate and prior lecture hearer) also points out that while the points allocation is important, the exam was fair.
He also thinks that the exam was not harder than before, as some questions were even recycled (Daniel disagrees with this statement).
He ranks the difficulty lower than Programming two, with a quite simple content.

Simon largely concurs, but wants to take a second look at the programming background required to be a student in bioinformatics.

To this Jens says that there is a expectation of programming, but complex topics like async or multithreading was not covered.

Manuel quotes ZBI, stating that "a strong background in computer-science" is required for the admission in the bioinformatics masters.

Alex has no background in the course, but looking at the exam he thinks that the content is not that theoretic and quite practical.

Mona has spotted a issues on the ZBI-website, but thinks the exam is fine

Max thinks as a person with a general cs-background, that the content covered is fine as well.

There was a suggestion that the course could move to a "twice-per-year" frequence.
This was considered unfeasible, as it would be a deviation from the usual "once-per-year" frequency of required events. GUEST_FROM_RAHMANN_CHAIR concurred and noted that there would be a stop of research if they were required to run even more courses.

There is a push toward moving the programming course from 5cp to 8cp since the ZBI thinks that the coding quality of the students at the end is not good enough.

There was a suggestion that the passing grade should be moved down from 50%.
Jens commented on their approach.
They start by grading the best exam as 100% and go from there, but this did not change the number of passing students.

Lukas proposes pushing this topic towards the Deans-Lunch as there seems to be an issue with admissions if the students are struggling with this exam so much.

Jens explained why the points were not listed on the re-exam.
In the first exam had a exercise that many people were unable to solve and they were unable to exclude this task when correcting, so they skipped the points assignment for the re-exam, which allowed them to shift points around to help more students to pass.

Mona proposes a different solution.
She wants to use more of the "Auflagen" for the masters admission.
The university allows for up to 30cp of additional required courses.
Jens says that they are currently not using those very much and thinks that they also should require something like programming 2 or GrAlgoDat.

Simon thinks it would be unfair to require programming 2, as this would be unfair and thinks that it would be a punishment for those meeting the requirement already.
Alex notes that this would not be required for every student and instead be something selectively applied to students missing the requirement.

Mona notes that there is no "programming" but instead a "informatik" requirement.

Manuel votes to close discussion.
There is no vote in favor of continuing the discussion.
Manuel closes the Topic.

Jens notes that some students wanted to do a project instead, but the chair had some bad experiences with using advent of code for this in an earlier iteration of the python programming course.
There was a project which covered all important aspects of the exam and should have prepared the students to do this well.

Abigail notes that while there is a valid concern with the admission, but there are current students which do not know how they should deal with this, as they are facing a third attempt.
Manuel says that there are many ways to deal with this programming.
Jens notes that there will be a bigger programming course coming with a new study-regulation.
This new bigger course should be a new module, which grants three new attempts.

Deans Lunch

Manuel Asks who is planning deans lunch.
Alex is in charge, but has not done much for it yet since he has to do lecture-assistant things.

The council confirms Alex as the person in charge for Deans-Lunch.
Alex will make a doodle and schedule it.

Quiz Night Season 2: Better, Faster, Stronger

Quiz Night will continue.
Lukas has already done some planning.
Next event is next week (October 25th) there will be our next Quiznight in Waldhaus.
November Quiz is in Wohnheim E and December will be in Rotenberg
We want to try out a Quiz MensaBar (if we can get it)

October Breakfast: Announcement

The next breakfast will be next Thursday (October 24th)

Manu has volunteered to make pumpkin soup, he will make it next Wednesday (October 23rd).

Interested parties can contact Lukas for helping at the Breakfast and Manu for cutting Pumpkins.

We are proud to announce AbsInt as a sponsor (they do software that works/is verifiable).
They will have a booth in the Verfügungsraum.

Ferdinand volunteers to (ask fis and if approved also) buy some non-open-flame-lights for pumpkins.

More Breakfasts?

Please picture the LOTR "what about second breakfast?"-Gif here.

Lukas also wants to have another (non-sponsored) breakfast in November.

Manuel wants to use this to boost election activity.
A short show of hands seems to show sufficient support by helpers.

FabLab: Tour with the FSR

Alex has made contact with the FabLab-People.
He wants to organize a FSR tour to take a look at this FabLab.

Alex will put a doodle in the Council group for this tour and email them about it.

There are some 3d Printers, Lathes and CnC-Machines.