Council meeting minutes from 2026-05-10

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

Dean's Lunch

We want to host another Dean's Lunch soon. For collecting topics to discuss, we have set up a Doc. The link can be found in this protocol, so members of the Students' Council should please add their ideas if they have any.

Enforced Group Work

Intro:
The Interactive Systems course has a mandatory group project. However, it was only announced in the lecture itself that this would have to be done in a group, and not e.g. in the CMS beforehand. Some people would much prefer if this was part of the course description and it was brought up that UdS apparently has a lot of enforced group work, which some people are unhappy with.


Discussion:
We reached the conclusion that it is okay if group work is only announced in the first lecture and not ahead of time (according to the study regulations). However, we think that it would still be nice to know about it in advance if possible.

How much group work you really have to do depends on which courses you are taking. However, we noticed that there are apparently a lot of mandatory courses with group work for people studying Media Informatics.

It was mentioned that being able to work in a group will be very important later on in life. However, it has to be noted that the setting in which you are working at university is quite different from what things will be like later on.

At university, the exact details can also vary for how group work is handled. It can be the case that you are able to choose your own team, that you are randomly assigned one or maybe that you are assigned a team based on how well you are doing.

An alternative option is to register for a lot of potential courses at the beginning of the semester and then drop the ones that you do not like later on.

One thing that we could do, is to bring this up during the next Dean's Lunch to encourage lecturers to let students know about mandatory group work upfront (e.g. via the CMS page) and to encourage them to also allow solo work as an alternative.

The problem with solo work, is that most courses do not have enough tutors etc. that are able to take on this additional workload. It was brought up that there have been „dynamic“ exercises in some cases. Meaning that the amount of work that the students have to do (and hence also the tutors) is based on the number of people working together. Of course, this dynamic system would have to be set up at some point first.

Having additional information available in advance, also allows students to be able to pick the courses they like more accurately, meaning that there will be less students in these courses that eventually just drop them, which also reduces the workload for tutors.


Conclusion:
We will bring this up during the next Dean's Lunch.

EML

Intro:
There have been complaints about the Elements of Machine Learning re-exam, as it was apparently much more abstract/theoretical/conceptual, while all materials, tutorials and even the main exam were much more focused on application.

This meant that any sort of preparatory material was not of much help for this re-exam.

It was also noted that there was a considerable reliance on prior knowledge/courses, which was out of scope for an introductory course, especially for international students.


Discussion:
There was the idea of maybe collecting some feedback from the course participants in an organized way, to have something concrete to show. Especially interesting could be the amount of time required for self-study, so that people could be made aware in advance that this course is comparatively a lot of work.

While we agreed that the re-exam can be harder than the main exam (mainly since you get additional time to prepare), this was not the actual issue here. It could be really helpful, if we could get the re-exam as a Thought Protocol to make available to students, so that they can better prepare themselves in the future.


Conclusion:
We will write an email to the lecturer to address the complaints and to ask if we could get the exam as a Thought Protocol. And one of us will look into potentially collecting more feedback from students.

KIF 54.5

Intro:
Apparently, the people that are currently planning this event are having a number of organizational issues. Some of us would like to try and organize the KIF 54.5 which will be taking place in November themselves here in Saarbrücken.


Discussion:
For sleeping spots, we could ask uni-sport or look into the theater room at Mensa.
It is expected that some of the KIF guests will eventually help out with certain things as well, once the event is taking place.

The financial status is currently unclear and has to be looked into more thoroughly, but it could be the case that we can get the funding that was already planned for the original location.

The people interested in planning this are currently asking around to establish certain boundaries (ability to book rooms etc.). They could also potentially present how far they have gotten at the upcoming KIF which is still taking place before November.

It would probably have to be on a weekend (e.g. arriving Thursday evening and leaving Monday morning).
When the time comes, the Students' Council will have to do a lot of work. Right now though, it is difficult to say how much help we will be able to provide in November.


Conclusion:
If we have the capabilities, we would mostly be in favor of this, so some of us will continue to look into the planning.

Summer BBQ

Our annual Summer BBQ will take place on July 2nd. If you have any ideas for activities that we could provide, please contact the respective Task Force. This is currently the biggest event that we have, so please be there to help out if you can.

Advertising things on our Social Media and other places

We get a good number of tickets from people wanting to advertise things on our Social Media etc.

There are mainly 3 categories:
1. Things that students benefit from
2. Advertisements for student surveys (made by students)
3. Advertisements from external companies

There is also lots of spam that we have to look out for.

For the first 2 categories, we are okay with sharing this on our Social Media, Discord and Pinboard.

Student Survey

One of us recently mentioned wanting to do a Student Survey himself. The draft for this is now ready and the link to which should be posted in our Signal group soon. We will use the results internally to improve our work.