Class 42: Wrapup

Held Friday, May 14

Summary

• End-of-course evaluations
• What we didn't study

Contents

Handouts

• Instituational end-of-course evaluations.

Notes

• Take-home end-of-course evaluations are due.

Handouts

• Final examination.

Notes

• The take-home end-of-course evaluations are due today.
• The final will be distributed (hardcopy only) today.
• Project reports are due today.

End-of-course Evaluations

As you probably know by now, based on recommendations from the executive council, the faculty have voted to try an experiment involving quantitative end-of-course evaluations. The experiment is to determine whether such evaluations can give an accurate numeric representation of the quality of faculty teaching.

In order for the experiment to be valid, you need to take these forms seriously, and not just fill in the blobs, but also include some text explaining your answers.

This semester, the evaluations will only be used to evaluate the evaluation system and not to evaluate faculty. In particular, the forms will only be seen by members of the institutional research staff and by the faculty you are evaluating.

If you have questions about the whole process, feel free to ask me inside or outside of class.

I'll give you about fifteen minutes to fill out the end-of-course evaluations. If you need more time, please let me know.

Wrapup

We've covered many topics in these fourteen weeks. We've also missed some potentially important topics in Programming languages. Let's spend some time reflecting on both aspects.

Covered

Missed

• Formal program verification, particularly through assertions
  • There's only so much time for formal stuff; we usually choose between denotational semantics and program verification
• Automatic program transformation
  • May be more interesting as a compilers topic
• Parallel languages
  • We looked at ways to parallelize FP
  • You can learn some concepts of parallelism in CS213
  • One particularly interesting language design perspective is how to represent data-parallelism vs. task-parallelism
• Novel control structures
  • Many languages courses discuss iterators, control based on stepping through data structures.
• Attribute grammars
  • Covered in the compilers course

Final Statements

• My mother taught Psychology at Boston University for over thirty years. (``Aha, maybe that explains SamR's warped personality''.) She ended every class with a similar statement. I try to do the same, although the statement is filtered through my sensibilities.

  Most of us will take or teach other classes. However, this one is unique; none will ever be quite like this it for a number of reasons. The people in the class made it what it was. We should acknoledge each other's contributions and commit ourselves to making similar contributions in future classes. In paritcular, I thank all of you for your contributions.

• Mom also makes a statement on the order of

  While I enjoyed having you in my class, I'm also happy to have you move on to other things. Like any parent or mentor, I've enjoyed seeing you grow, but also want you to test your own wings.

• Mom also tells a story of an elementary school teacher she had worked with who was leaving her job. Mom stopped by to give the teacher a goodbye present. The teacher cried. Mom said ``I expect that you've been crying all day as you said goodbye to your students'' The teacher said ``No, I forgot to say goodbye''. Since then mom has always made it a point to say goodbye to her classes. I encourage you to say goodbye to your friends and colleagues who you may not see again.

History

• Created Monday, January 11, 1999.
• Added short summary on Friday, January 22, 1999.
• Filled in the details on Sunday, May 9, 1999. Many of the details were taken from outline 53 and the final review sheet from CS152 98S.

History

• Created Tuesday, January 19, 1999 as a blank outline.
• Filled in some details on Sunday, May 9, 1999.