Minutes of the Staff-Student Joint Committee Meeting held on

Monday 28 October 2002 at 2.15 pm in the Board Room

Present	Dr A Al-Tabbaa			Mr SJ Ingram
	Mr AJ Cable			Mr M Jung
	Mrs CB Drummond			Mr JA Ma
	Mr TG Froggatt			Dr RJ Miller
	Mr ML Groombridge			Dr GT Parks
	Ms R Hanzal			Dr JA Williams
	Mrs J Hawtrey-Woore			Ms AG Yetginer
In attendance for item 02.30		Mr JE Lindop

02.25            Apologies for absence

Apologies for absence were deemed to have been received from Ms SA Bird.

02.26   Minutes of the meeting held on 13^th May 2002

The minutes of the meeting held on 13 May 2002 were approved.

02.27   Matters arising from the Minutes

            02.08(i) CUED local web page design

Dr Parks reported that the Teaching Office web pages had been restructured in line with the alternative design proposed by Mr Cable. It was agreed that:

• this new structure represented a considerable improvement;
• it was desirable that similar improvements be introduced to other areas of the CUED local web pages;
• this matter should be discussed further with Mr Matheson.

            02.08(ii) Fast Feedback Facility

Dr Parks reported a web-based version of the Fast Feedback Facility (FFF) had been developed and tested, and would go live in the very near future.

02.17(v) Best lecturer awards

Mr Cable reported (on behalf of the now graduated Mr Murray) that awards for the 2000-1 academic year had been presented, but that it appeared that the competition for the 2001-2 academic year had not been held.

02.24 (v) Tripos cribs

Dr Parks reported that it was feasible for the Tripos Crib web pages to be made accessible from outside Cambridge via a PIN-protected interface, but this would not be possible until a secure web server had been introduced. It was hoped that this might be done by the Christmas vacation; it would certainly be done by the Easter vacation.

02.28   SSJC and Faculty Board elections on Tuesday 26 November 2002

Dr Parks outlined the arrangements for the forthcoming elections. He undertook to circulate all the student members of the SSJC with transparencies that can be used to encourage people to stand for the SSJC and also to encourage them to vote in the elections. He also highlighted the need for assistance manning the ballot boxes and conducting the count on the day of the election and undertook to email the student members about this nearer the time.

02.29   SSJC booksale

Ms Hanzal and Mr Ingram reported that all the necessary arrangements for the booksale were in place.

02.30            Suggestions for the teaching of Part 1 (A and B) Engineering

Mr Lindop introduced and summarised the paper (SSJC:02.10.02) he had brought to the SSJC. It was agreed that the paper should be passed on to the Teaching Committee with the SSJC’s endorsement for further consideration.

The following points were noted from the discussion of the points raised by the paper:

• That new/inexperienced supervisors would find it beneficial to the planning of supervisions to ask supervisees to hand in their attempts at examples papers in advance, and that this recommended good practice should be added to the “Guidelines for New Supervisors of Engineering Students”;
• That a key issue highlighted by the paper was the need for an appropriate balance in the use of worked examples in lecture courses and that it would therefore be helpful to added a question about worked examples to the standard Lecture Questionnaire issued by the Teaching Office;
• That, should it be agreed that Part I Examples Papers Cribs be placed on the web, a suitable time to do so would on the same day as the relevant Examples Class;
• That, if so requested, Mr Lindop and his co-authors would be willing to provide examples of the sort of “short, starter questions” they would like added to Examples Papers;
• That past Tripos papers might provide a useful source of “unseen examples” associated with Examples Papers for discussion in supervisions.

02.31   Dates of future meetings

The handover meeting, for current student members and newly-elected members only, will take place on Monday 2nd December 2002 at 2.15 pm in the Board Room. The next full SSJC meeting will take place on Monday 3rd February 2003 at 2.15 pm in the Board Room.

02.32   Any other business

(i)                  Part IB Matlab Demonstrators

Mr Ingram reported concerns about the competence of some of the demonstrators on this activity. It was agreed that this should be brought to the attention of the member of staff responsible for this activity.

(ii)                Part IB Boundary Layers Experiment

Mr Ingram reported concerns about the length of the write-up required for this experiment. It was agreed that this should be brought to the attention of the member of staff responsible for this activity.

(iii)               Feedback Mechanisms

It was agreed that the foregoing two points should really have been brought up at the time through the FFF rather than via an SSJC representative after the event. This highlighted the need to increase the profile of the FFF. It was agreed that the Teaching Office should prepare and distribute about the department some suitable posters reminding students of the FFF’s existence and purpose.

It was further agreed that it would also encourage feedback on coursework activities if copies of the comment form (currently issued to students in their coursework folders) were also available in each undergraduate laboratories, and if demonstrators were to encourage students to use these at the end of each lab session.

(iv)              Word Processing of Part I Long Lab Reports

It was agreed that the Coursework Committee should be asked to reconsider/clarify the current position with respect to the permissibility of word-processing reports for Part I long labs.

(v)                Thanks to outgoing SSJC members

Dr Williams thanked the members of the SSJC for whom this was their last meeting for their contributions during the year.