Council meeting minutes from 2025-02-20

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

Intro to AlgoDat - Poor Exam Results

The Base lecture of AlgoDat by Prof. Bringmann had the main exam last week. The results showed that the overall results were rather low, and specific tasks were really bad.

We discuss the results and potential courses of action. The overall passing rate was around 30%. The first question had an okayish (to be expected) distribution of points. Theoretically it was possible to pass the exam with Task 1 alone. However nearly all students got 0 points for Tasks 2-4.
Manuel believes that this is concerning and wanted to discuss it. Prof. Bringmann provided us with the actual exam for us to get a better picture of the tasks. While Manuel is biased, he summarized the tasks from his perspective:
- Task 1 could easily be solved by learning facts from the scripts
- While Tasks 2 and 3 were a bit more complex they may still be solvable with a little thinking (medium difficulty). From Manuels perspective task 4 was the hardest among all, but not too hard.

Simon brings up the point to compare it to exams from previous iterations. From his perspective one of the previous iterations had a simpler task 2 while the other tasks had a similar complexity (And point distributions)

After criticism about the difficulty of exercise sheets, Prof. Bringmann made the sheets easier in this year, which might lead to more people getting the exam admission. Prof. Bringmann added, that generative AI assistants are more powerful than in the past so it might be that students utilized those during the exam sheets, leading to less understanding.

Kamila remarks that in their opinion the exam by Prof. Bringmann needed bigger "leaps" in understanding as compared to other comparable exams e.g. by Prof. Seidl.
Simon remarks that it might be that Prof. Bringmanns teaching style rather focusses on application instead of replication. I.e., you apply known concepts to a somewhat new problem type to get to a solution.

Manuel recaptures that in his opinion, the tasks 2 and 3 were rather standard tasks for an AlgoDat exam, while he acknowledges that a hint towards the solution might have been good to nudge students in the correct direction. However that might make the solution to a task too obvious.

We discussed whether an exam should be based on "tricks" or whether not all AlgoDat problems are just finding and applying tricks.

Multiple people raise the point that it might be useful to have a different structure in the exam which allows the grading of subtasks that build on each other but might still be solvable individually.

We tried to close the discussion to agree on an opinion. It is difficult to subjectively judge how hard the exams are, as people are either biased because they took the course or have insufficient knowledge on what was taught in the lectures.
Manuel mentions that from his perspective was hard and also harder than the exams in previous years but not impossibly hard, which was also mitigated by lowering the passing threshold. He agrees on the opinion that one of the reasons might be the use of ChatGPT or other assistants for solving the exercise sheet.

During the discussion we noticed that we currently have no thought protocols for the base lecture by Prof. Bringmann which might make it harder for students to get a grip of how exams are structured by them. However generally from the memory of several students that listened to lectures by Prof. Bringmann the exercise sheets are a rather helpful preparation for the exams. Also while other lecturers might have different teaching styles, solving thought protocols from their iteratins will most likely still benefit in preparing for the exam.

There was a general consensus that as an advise for future iterations, the exercise sheets should be harder to solve than exam tasks, as you also have more time to think about them etc. In addition it might be helpful to have more subtasks in exercises to allow a more fine-grained point distribution. Also it might be advisable to increase the time limit of the exam.

Manuel will contact Prof. Bringmann and inform him about our discussion.

Re-Exam Schedule of Base Lectures

Manuel noticed that the re-exams for the third semester are sometimes back to back, which might lead to a very tight schedule for students.
While there is still some checking going on that exams are not happening on the same day, we could kindly ask the study coordination to try and schedule a gap between bigger lectures.

Jan-Philipp volunteers to write a mail to Evelyn and ask whether that is reasonable.

SIC Merch Update

Manuel updates us on the SIC Merch planning.
The Payment and shop provider is already decided. In a first round, Shirts and Hoodies will be available. It was agreed to try to get fair trade producer.
The next steps are:
- Looking for suitable suppliers
- While there is a preliminary design, there are some final touches still to happen
- Most likely it would be mono-color to keep the price down. But other options will be explored, whether multiple colors can be achieved at a reasonable price

Constituting Meeting

The Constituting Meeting will take place on February 24th at 5PM in the Students' Council room. Hybrid options will be offered to people who are not in Germany and ask nicely.

Everyone is invited to join.

Aquarium Updates

The Aquarium is the glass room next to the E1.3 entrance. It is "owned" by the VC course of study.
However we discussed that since it only benefits a small amount of people. We talked to Erich who agreed that the students council as the students' representatives are able to make a decision to open that room. He asks us for a vote which he will support.

While we are generally open to making the room available, we would defer this decision to the new council.

Aquarium Update 2 - Electric Boogaloo

There was the idea floating around of offering the aquarium to the Bachelor+Mint students council, as they are currently homeless and have no dedicated room. While we do not represent the BSc+Mint students, they still belong to our faculty and used to own a room in E1.1.
They currently have 13 elected members which makes the need for a room apparent. However it will be debatable whether it is "fair" to our students to take it away from VC with the argument that it benefits only a small amount of students and giving it to another course of study altogether. In the end we should lead to discussion up to the upcoming students' council.

Status Report Mail Task Force

Kevin gives an update on the snail mail and mailing lists task forces.
- We now have lights in our letterbox
- The sign on our letterbox has been updated
- We have a mirror in our letterbox

Kevin presents some incomplete statistics. Generally things are going well while there is moderate spam.

Dishwasher Odyssey

The new dishwasher has arrived and is operational. However due to some hiccup in the Amazon UI which leads to delays in pickup in the old device.

Lukas scolds everyone who did not clean their dishes and just put it on the countertop. He also emphasized that we will hunt everyone in their dreams who does not use the new dishwasher properly.

There was a question whether we want to reinstate the dirty dishes tablet. The general notion was no as it encourages people to not use it properly.

We might or might not bless the dishwasher with holy water. Regarding stickers on the new dishwasher, Lukas asks everyone to only put them on the decorative board and not on the front panel.

Switching Communications Channel to Signal

Deferred to the next council.

Stickers for Entry Control

Alex did not held up his deadline of finishing the stickers. Shame.

We might install Windows on his machine as a punishment.