ECE Curriculum Committee Meeting Minutes for October 19, 2007

1. The Minutes of the October 12, 2007 meeting were approved with corrections.
2. The Curriculum Committee approved the proposal from the Computer Engineering Area Committee regarding prerequisites for the Computer Engineering sequence. ECE 110 is to be a prerequisite for ECE 190; ECE 190 is now a co-requisite, rather than a prerequisite, with ECE 290. ECE 290 remains a prerequisite for ECE 391.

   The Curriculum Committee agreed that in general CS 125 and CS 231 should be accepted in place of ECE 190 and ECE 290, respectively, as prerequisites, but not to formally list them as such.

3. Following Jont Allen's suggestion, the Committee voted to set up a listserv for email discussions.
4. Wide-ranging discussions continued on ideas for implementing the advanced core resolution. Steve Levinson siad that after reviewing the list of topics and our current course structure, he felt that the current partition of material into courses is mostly pretty good, and that substantial changes in our course structure may not be needed. The Committee mostly agreed, although Erhan Kudeki suggested that we should at least explore more radical changes. As an example, he suggested the idea of a course involving elements of both electromagnetics and physical electronics to replace ECE 329 and ECE 440 in the current required curriculum.

   It was noted that control theory, communications, and treatment of noise are not in the current core courses; others responded that these topics appear in various guises, such as feedback in op-amp circuits and AM in ECE 210, and probability distributions in ECE 313. It was suggested that either ECE 210 or 410 should include a more explicit introduction to basic feedback control. Students' mastery of complex variables was questioned, and Steve Levinson suggested that we consider whether the new advanced engineering math course should be included in the advanced core.

5. Doug Jones characterized the EE curriculum as based on the three general components of Physics, Math, and Computing, and drew a pie diagram that organized our courses along these lines. The Committee found this useful, and asked him to create and distribute a nicer version of this, which he promised to do.
6. The Committee adjourned at 11:51 AM.