A Study of Student Performance In Combined Courses

ABSTRACT

Here at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, there are certain graduate courses that are open to both graduate students and upper-level undergraduate students. In the Computer Science Department, due to a lack of teaching faculty, for a period of time some of these courses became required courses for both undergraduate and certain graduate students, rather than having separate required courses for each. Similarly, for the same time period, most of the elective courses available to undergraduate students were those courses which were also open to graduate students, and thus also heavily populated by graduate students. This study investigates whether undergraduate students overall suffer by being placed in courses with graduate students. Similarly, it investigates whether the graduate students suffer by being placed in courses with undergraduate students. Both required and elective courses are examined, Variations such as additional preparation in the form of an extra prerequisite for undergraduates are investigated. The impact of student quality as indicated by ACT scores and GRE scores are also taken into account. The study found that undergraduate students perform about the same in courses with graduate students as they do in courses where normally only undergraduate students are present.

Keywords: graduate, undergraduate, students, performance

1. INTRODUCTION

In the Computer Science department at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), there is an active undergraduate program and an active graduate program. The undergraduate program is a fairly traditional program, except that many students work part- or full- time and therefore there are often a number of older students in a course. The graduate program includes part time students who work full time in local industry, and also a large number of full time students, most often foreign students who are attending the university on a student visa. Many of the full time graduate students work half time as teaching assistants or research assistants.

Undergraduate courses at UAH are numbered at the 100-to400-levels. Graduate courses are numbered at the 500-level and 600-level (700-level courses are PhD courses and are not included in this discussion). 500-level courses are open to both graduate students and advanced undergraduate students. Graduate students can take 400-level courses but they do not count toward the graduate student's degree. Graduate courses at the 600-level are not normally open to undergraduate students. Content and organization of such courses is usually different depending on level (Wankat and Oreovicz, 1993).

In the past (in the 1980s), most undergraduate courses were filled primarily with undergraduate students, and most graduate courses (500-level and 600-level courses) were filled primarily with graduate students. However, beginning approximately in the middle 1990s, some of this differentiation of courses was lost, primarily due to a lack of the faculty required to cover all these separate courses.

For example, originally undergraduates took a 2-course architecture sequence, CS309 (a course on Digital Logic), and CS413 (Computer Architecture). Some entering graduate students who had a deficiency in the architecture area, typically due either to their undergraduate university (often a foreign university) stressing different areas, or due to their having had a BS degree in an area other than Computer Science, would take a remedial course, CS513 (Introduction to Computer Architecture). CS513 is a course that combines all the material from CS309 and CS413 into the same course.

For several years in the early to mid-90s, CS413 was taught by a reliable part-time instructor. However, when this part-time instructor ceased to teach the course, there were not enough reliable instructors available to ensure that CS309, CS413, and CS513 could all three be taught on a regular basis. The initial plan of the then-chair of the CS department was to have both undergraduate and graduate students take CS513, and to no longer teach CS309 or CS413. However, the instructors of those courses thought that CS513 by itself was too accelerated a course for many of the undergraduate students. Thus, a compromise was reached: those graduate students who needed it would continue to take CS513, as before. Undergraduate students would take CS309, and then take CS513 as the second course (instead of CS413).

Similarly, there were once two separate courses on Programming Languages, CS424 (Programming Languages for undergraduates), and CS624 (Programming Languages for graduate students). These were combined into a single course, CS524, which was a required course for all undergraduate students, and which was required for all graduate students who did not have a similar programming languages course in their undergraduate curriculum. For this course, on the first day of class a programming proficiency exam was administered. Students who failed this exam would normally be expected to remedy this lack of proficiency (usually by taking a remedial programming course) before being allowed into the course.