CIS Department

Rationale for the Restructuring of the BBA in CIS

Initially, our department began these discussions as a result of a very poor placement by our students in the annual Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) programming contest. After considerable discussions on our email system, the instructors of our Systems Design course also complained of the lack of programming skills from a number of the students…particularly those skills requiring object-oriented concepts. Central to these complaints is the fact that a student may now take two introductory programming courses and complete his or her two programming course requirement.

We initiated the creation of three "programming tracks."  Beginning Fall, 2000, a student is required to take two associated programming courses, one beginning and one intermediate course.  We require this two-course sequence begin in their first semester of CIS courses. A student will not be able to fulfill their 2-course programming requirement with two beginning-level courses.  The three tracks are: 1) C/C++ (CIS 3260/CIS 3280 - already in place); 2) Internet programming (CIS 3260/CIS 3270 - also already in place); 3) Visual Programming (CIS 3210/CIS 32xx - a new, intermediate Visual Programming course will be offered. The syllabus is attached).

Details

However, by creating these programming tracks, we also change the sequencing of our undergraduate courses.  See the following changes:

1. Made CIS 3320, Introduction to Telecommunication, available as a first-year course. This was accomplished by removing the programming prerequisite for this course. However, this course remains a required course for the BBA degree. 
2. Created a new telecommunications course that has CIS 3320 and a programming language as prerequisites. This serves three purposes. First, we moved any elements of the original telecommunications course that required programming skills into this second course. Second, students will now have the chance to "concentrate" on the telecommunications area. Third, we meet the increased demand in this area caused by the rise of Internet technologies. Students may take this new telecommunications course as early as the second semester of their BBA program. 
3. Moved CIS 4730 into a first year course without a programming prerequisite.  This allows students to have DB knowledge BEFORE entering the System Analysis and Design courses.  Many of the faculty/instructors of the SAD courses have had this on their "wish list."  We renumbered this course to CIS 3730 to reflect the change in its status. Faculty discussions concluded the programming knowledge necessary for this course is minimal. Those concepts requiring this knowledge could be placed anywhere after the thirteenth week of the semester. Thus, students would then be assured of having most of these basic programming skills from the programming course they will have either already had or will be taking concurrently.
4. Changed the status of the COBOL course, CIS 3220 to an elective course. This course may NOT be used in a required programming track. Now that Y2K has passed, we expect the demand for COBOL to drop dramatically. In fact, we are already seeing this.