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

On 31/03/06, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> 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.

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?)

* 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.

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.

--
Tristan.

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