Re: OT: US university course numbering (was Re: "to be" and not to be in the world's languages)

Tristan Alexander McLeay wrote:
>
> Mark J. Reed wrote:
> >
> > Incidentally, Georgia Tech (my alma mater) uses four-digit course
> > numbers.  The first digit is the year, the second two identify the
> > course series uniquely within the major,
>
> This one slightly confuses me. "Course" I'm aware means what I call
> "subject" or "unit" in the US, and I thought that "major"
> approximately corresponded to a blend of what I'd call a "degree", a
> "course" and a "major", tho now I'm not so sure.
A "course" is a one-semester class on a particular topic. For
example, the Spanish Department may offer the following
one-semester courses:

SP 101  Introduction to Spanish I
SP 102  Introduction to Spanish II
SP 201  Intermediate Spanish I
SP 202  Intermediate Spanish II
SP 240  Introduction to Spanish Literature, Spain
SP 241  Introduction to Spanish Literature, South America

Course SP 101 would be taken in the autumn semester and SP 102
in the winter semester.

A second-year student majoring in Computer Science might take
some 200-level computer courses, Spanish 101, Math 210 (Integral
Calculus), etc.


> If you have a certain major, will you not ever do subjects that
> students of another major will do? Will the same subject have two
> different codes? (e.g. if a maths student and a computer science
> student both do first year discrete maths with the same lecturer* and
> in the same tutorials* and so forth, might the subject be MA 1391 for
> one and CS 1821 for another?)
Generally, no. The number for the course would be MA 1391 for
all students regardless of their majors. The only time I've seen two
numbers for the same course was during a transitioning period
when courses were being moved to another department. For example,
when I was in college in the early 1970s, the university was setting up
a new computer science department. The computer courses were
part of the math department, so they were assigned new numbers as
they were moved. Advanced Fortran went from MA 340 to CS 140.


> * I think these terms are not used in the US, at least not
> colloquially. I hope my meaning is clear, but I don't know what else
> to call them. "Lecturer"~="professor" I *think*, but I have no idea if
> you even have tutes, and if so what you call them. Basically smaller
> classes (in the vicinity of 20 students) usually led by an honours,
> masters or PhD student but precisely what occurs is about as varied
> as subjects are.
It's common for introductory classes to be taught by graduate students
in the larger universities. I started at Michigan Technological University
where my calculus classes were taught by professors. Then I transferred
to the University of Michigan where the calculus classes were taught by
graduate students.


> and the final one is the
> > position of the particular quarter (or, these days, semester) in the
> > sequence.  Thus, the introduction to computer programming was a
> > two-part series consisting of CS 1401 and CS1402.  No other CS
> > ("computer science") coruses had "40" in the middle.
>
> I have no idea if there's anything approaching the possibility of
> generalising about subject codes in Australia, but I doubt it. I was
> surprised when Philip Newton tried to, and I'm not surprised that
> there's been decent.
>
> In any case, at my uni (La Trobe), subject codes are alphanumeric, and
> consist of the an abbreviation of the school or department which
> offers them (or the field that they're offered in), two numbers
> denoting the year level they are and the semester they're offered in
> and another (usually) three letters which are an abbreviation of the
> subject name. e.g. CSE31SMM is a third-year subject offered in the
> first semester by the Department of Computer Science and Computer
> Engineering, called "System Measurements and Metrics" or somesuch like
> that; LIN22SEM is a second semester, second year linguistics subject
> called "Semantics"; PSY30PY is an all-year third-year subject offered
> by the School of Psychology called "Psychology". 4, 5 and 6 in the
> year section are used for various honours and postgrad subjects.
Interesting.

--Ph. D.