Preparing CS Honours students for a research career: the Wollongong experience

International Journal of Electrical Engineering Education, Jul 2005 by Fulcher, John A, Piper, Ian C

In the first section we discussed the role of Honours in general - now we turn our attention to the role of CS Honours in particular. Experience has shown that only around 20% of CS/IT Honours students continue to research postgraduate study. The majority, instead, view an Honours degree as enhancing their employment prospects, whereas only a minority are interested in taking the 'more interesting/specialist' subjects on offer at the 400-level for their own inherent interest value (many of which are joint graduate/Honours offerings, available for study by enrolees in coursework masters degrees).

Evolution of CS Honours

Until 2001, CS Honours was structured as follows:

Semester 7(13 weeks)

Three 400-level subjects (typically 2 contact hours per week) individual project

Semester II (13 weeks)

Two 400-level subjects (typically 2 contact hours per week) individual project

A student's final Honours grade is calculated out of 800, with the individual project given three times the weighting of each 400-level subject.

It should be mentioned that the capstone of students' (3-year) Bachelor of Computer Science degree is a group software project (typically with a group size of from 4 to 6). Some students have obtained employment in the past based solely on their performance in this 300-level project. Typically, students put most effort in their third year of study into this project (often to the detriment of their other subjects).

In their Honours year, students undertake an individual (solo) project, and thus are not hampered by fellow group members, and can soar to great heights, as it were. It had become apparent that success for the minority of students who did proceed on to postgraduate studies was not as well correlated with prior undergraduate performance, particularly performance in the 300-level project, as would be expected. Actual Honours performance was somewhat hit-and-miss. We attributed this to two related factors. First, the honours project had more of the flavour of a genuine research project than was the case with the group project and second, there was no formal research training component in (or prior to) their Honours year.

In response to this, from 2002, we introduced a compulsory Honours seminar in the first semester, to take the place of one of the 400-level subjects. The format for this seminar is actually hybrid in nature: (i) for the first 4 weeks (of 13), CS Honours students take the same research methodology subject as the IT Honours students, and (ii) for the remaining 9 weeks, they actively participate in the seminar proper.

During the first 4 weeks, (both) Honours cohorts (together with some Masters-level students - i.e. those without appropriate backgrounds) are tutored in the following:

1 writing a research proposal,2

2 various research models (e.g. hypothesis testing),

3 preparing a draft literature review (later to become chapter 1 of their thesis),

4 draft research methodology (chapter 2),

5 library searching (monographs, journals & on-line)