Resumen de A new metric for assessing quality inadvanced graduate courses in computer science and engineering
This paper presents a philosophy that underlies the design of a few advanced graduate courses atASU in the sub-disciplines of hardware description languages, communications networks, compu-ter-aided design of digital systems, distributed systems, distributed algorithms, and modeling andsimulation. From the philosophy, a new metric emerges: the extent and significance of theknowledge `discovered' by the students, towards evaluating the quality of such courses. Discoveryrefers to the knowledge that is brought out into the open, through logical reasoning from the firstprinciples, by the student for himself/ herself. It is significant in that it becomes an integral part ofthe individual who not only gains invaluable insight and confidence in the subject matter, but canimprovise, reason, and apply it to other areas in creative ways. The choice of the metric isinfluenced by the author's experience as a doctoral student at Stanford and as a faculty, first atBrown and currently at ASU, as well as the candid comments and feedback from full-time graduatestudents and graduate students coming from industry. The paper illustrates the application of themetric through a number of actual cases encountered during teaching at ASU. It also presents a listof the desirable attributes of the underlying educational environment to ensure success in the designand delivery of such courses.
