COMPUTER SCIENCE NEWSLETTER Department of Computer Science March 9, 2001
Enrollment	About 180 MS students requested to switch from Thesis Option to Non-Thesis Option. A confirmation was mailed to students late February. Students entering this semester have until the end of March to select Plan 2. Currently, we have about 420 graduate students, down from about 470 last semester. Of the 420 students, 25 are working toward Ph.D. degrees. To improve the quality of the students, we are taking steps to limit the enrollment for both graduate and undergraduate students.
VIP: the only way to add a course	During the last few semesters, the department staff have been helping students with course changes (add/drop) after the VIP registration period ended. The staff have access to the registration system for one additional week. This has caused a lot of traffic to the office and wasted valuable time of our staff. Effective April 16, 2001, the Computer Science Department staff will no longer add or drop students. Students must use the VIP system for adding/dropping classes. For regular semesters, the last day to use the VIP system is typically the seventh day of the classes. Please consult http://www.uh.edu/enroll/rar/enrollment_schedule.html for a specific date for each semester.
Major Field Test	As some of you may already know, you can take a national test called the Major-Field Test in your senior year. You are strongly urged to take that test, and the department will pay for the test fee ($22.75 per student). This test is mainly designed to assess the comparative merit of our undergraduate curriculum. It is given in two 60-minute sessions, each of which consists of 30 questions in all core subject areas of computer science. The format of questions are very similar to that of SAT and GRE. All graduating seniors are strongly urged to take this exam. If you did well, you can use that to dress up your credentials in job hunting. Otherwise, you just keep quiet, and there will be no impact whatsoever on you as an individual. In any case, by taking the exam, you help your beloved department to assess its undergraduate curriculum. Please seriously think about this, and let me know via email (jhuang@cs.uh.edu) if you decide to take the test so that we can get organized. I will give you a tutorial, and help you to get ready to take the exam in about one month time. (From an E-mail to all Undergraduate Students by Professor J. C. Huang)
Summer and Fall Course Schedule	An advanced copy of the summer and fall course schedule is available on the department web site. Please check the web site before you register since we expect some changes to the schedule. The printed copy of the schedule for Fall was compiled in early February. Since that we have added one course (4310) for the summer and one course (6320) for the fall.