ESD Senior Town Hall FAQ

Legend

S: $\Rightarrow$ Student suggestion/feedback/questions
P: $\Rightarrow$ Response from Professor Peter Jackson

Covid-19

• Changes to Exams (especially Finals)
  P:
  • Over the past few weeks, there had been an emphasis on reducing the precentage of final exam.
  • Due to the current situation, there will not be any physical final exam.
  • The final “assignment” or “test” could be either take home assiganment or online exam with the possibility of using Respondus Monitor to prevent cheating.
  • No physical project is required this semester (even for ESA which usually requires presenting a game)
• Online learning and social distancing
  P:
  • I had e-mailed to the faculty once the social distancing law was out on Wednesday and recommended to them to go full online.
  • Currently since the situation has escalated, we have opted for full online-based learning. This is a decision made at a MOE and University level and cannot be controlled at pillar level.
  • Social distancing is enforced by law and we want to keep everyone safe. Thus we should be responsible and follow regulation.

S: Due to the fact of e-learning, do we still get to consult the professors if we have any questions about the course?
P: There should be a reduced level ofphysical consultation, best if there isn’t any. The faculty might not be in the office physically. Best to reach out to them online via zoom, email or piazza.

Course communication and changes

• Energy Systems and Management
  P:

  • It was originally availabe as we got a great professor that could teach it. We wanted it to get the professor to teach as an adjunct professor again this coming Summer’20 but he wanted to focus on his own business instead. We had to cancel it near the end of last year due to this reason.
  • Looking ahead, we realise that students could get in trouble if there weren’t enough TAE courses available. So at the start of the term, Aileen (our ESD Program Director) wrote an advisory and we found a faculty offered to teach the course. We managed to get at least 10 students so it’s back on curriculum for Term 8.
  • Long term solution is to hire more faculty so we do not have to rely on adjuncts. But for now this is the struggle and we seek student understanding

• Equity Valuation
  P: It was approved in November last year and we could not announce a course that is not approved. Thus it seems that it was a surprise when the module selection process began.

• Upcoming new courses
  P: We are in the process of hiring new faculty and working hard to get new courses approved as soon as possible. This will be done hopefully in time for Term 8. We will announce as soon as we get it approved but until then we cannot put out information because some students might make decisions on what courses to take based on this.

• New Freshmore Course
  P: It has already been announced there will be a merge of probability and statistics course due to the change in freshmore curriculum. ESD might offer advance probability and statistics for new batches, thus freeing up one module in term 5 (possible 1 more core module that is data-focused to better prepare students for internship) however this does not affect graduating students and will happen over several years.

Courses ultimately cannot be revealed without being approved because it will affect student decision-making process. However, having more platforms like this townhall could help alleviate student anxiety about them.

Communication

S: Currently information is distributed in different channels such as ESD bulletin, email and posters, is there a consolidated way of information distribution?
P: I would like to do a poll to gather the preferred way of information distribution. It could be email, telegram chat or any other ways that you suggest. We could also have an archieve of all messages from the pillar in ESD bulletin as a place of reference.

Will have to follow up on a set communication flow so people know where to get updated.

Project Showcase

P:

• We are currently keeping projects from ESA,SMA and MSO. They are displayed occasionally in library and ESD office. It is not practical to showcase all projects at all time, furthermore they could be damaged or stolen.
• For the projects without NDA issues, we could show them. But it is difficult due to many physical limitations. Thus I always push for videos so that we could easily show them in our office space.

S:
As orientation being cancelled, there could perhaps be a session to showcase projects
There are 2 use cases -

1. should I go to SUTD and subsquently ESD
2. what is the standard of project i should hit for my course

It would be nice to show these projects at places where people could see often, so that they could get interested or inspired.

Now that things have gone virtual, there’s an opportunity to put these material up and improve awareness of ESD projects.

Fast-track program

S: There is an existing lack of awareness of this program and the courses are mostly ISTD (AI for this year) thus having pre-requisites that clash with focus tracks.
P: The original intention is to create the option for a small group of students entering a small set of prestigious finance companies for trainee program in July/August. This is because these finance companies have set hiring processes and do not wish to change then. We would like to publicise the availablity of the program. There is a ESD/ISTD collaboration to offer courses for this programme.

Lack of awareness of this option has led to some students not even applying for said finance companies, possibly leading out to lost opportunities.

Analytics Edge

S:
The main concerns are of following:

• As the project is on week 13, people do and focus a lot on the project at risk of not doing well for other mods
• Project became a test of improving accuracy and tuning of parameter but it was not the focus of the course.
• Duration of 1 week is too short.
• The topic of NLP has readily available solutions online.
• Usage of forbidden libraries and tools
• Last minute clarification of rules
• Graded Public ladder ranking putting undue pressure
• Student not aware of R dependencies which lead to forbidden libraries being used, unwittingly violating the rules.

Several suggestions:

• Shift the time frame to week 10-12 with a longer time period, since the material of later weeks are not used
• Considering python instead of R
• Clear rules and implementation of rules
• Lower weightage of public ladder
• Focus on understanding of the course instead of winning the kaggle competition
• Share the top 2 winning entries so other students can learn from how it was done

Prof. Stefano:
The public ranking was given a minor percentage of the grade.
We are aware of possible cheating and the faculty debugged all submitted code and penalised those who cheated.

Will need to evaluate the tradeoff of having a more ‘live’ method of assessment with the learning goals of the term.

Course evaluation

S: Currently the survey is only at Mid Term or End of Term. Is it possible for us to raise feedback continuously?
P: I would prefer platform such as Piazza if your course is using it, to raise your concerns
S: It is difficult to feel the effect of our feedback after the survey
P: I bring each faculty to my office and go through your feedback to them every semester. Your comments won’t simply disappear,in fact, every feedback has direct impact.

The issue is about transparency of what is being done with the feedback and letting students know concerns are being addressed.

Grading

S: Could we share the grade distribution for exams.
P: I show the distribution of grades for the courses I teach. There’s a slight cultral resistance here in SUTD towards showing the the distribution of grades among the faculty. But I tried to lead by example.
S: Students are often busy and could not make it for the particular slot for checking of paper. It is noted that checking of paper could improve one’s score drastically. Personal anecdote is that student has checked his score only once or twice in his entire time here but each time there is a marking discrepancy. Perhaps we could scan the marked paper for the students, though logistically challenging. For example, in Sweden TAs and student helpers are paid to help scan the papers so students can check the marking online without being physically present.

Will have to look into the overall feasibility of this solution.

One good thing about ESD

Professors - Sergey (has finally joined ESD!), kind and helpful, always take the time to talk to students, go the extra mile. Many students at the townhall reflected this
Plenty of administrative support from staff, appreciate them providing guidance
Available and interesting projects each term, this was a conscious effort because previously Term 5 didn’t have any projects whatsoever