The Changing Face OF UK Computer Science Education

At undergraduate and postgraduate level, UK Universities offering degrees in Information Systems and Computer Science have been responding to a series of challenges and opportunities. Dr Richard Harvey from the Computing Sciences department at the University of East Anglia identifies these trends and shows how they affect applicants.

A few year's ago my own department at the University of East Anglia decided to change its name from the School of Information Systems to the School of Computing Sciences. The reasoning was obvious, it wasn't that Information Systems was not important, far from it - we still teach popular degrees in these subjects, it was that the subject had broadened and become critical to a huge variety of modern endeavours including business and the sciences.

A typical Computing Science school might run courses from Computer Systems Engineering through to Business Information Systems through to Bioinformatics. In essence, almost every discipline now has some need for computing and successful computing sciences departments are following this trend and fulfilling that need.

Alongside this broadening in intellectual demand for the subject, UK Computer Science departments continue to seek very high levels of quality assurance. A typical top‑quality computing science department will annually review its courses at all levels using an External Examiner, who will be a senior academic from another University, with further root‑and‑branch reviews at least every five years. Additionally, high quality departments will almost always seek accreditation from either the British Computer Society of the Institution of Electrical Engineers. Such accreditation is very far from a rubber stamp and after three days of scrutiny by an experienced panel, most departments feel that there is little that has escaped notice.

A further element is what the newspapers call “league tables". It is difficult to place much trust in league tables - they are invariably compiled in a hurry using nationally available data - a University's position in the league table seems to depend entirely on how the compiler has decided to weight a variety of factors, many of which are several years out of date or of dubious provenance. However, a more recent innovation is the National Student Survey (available online at www.tqi.ac.uk) which gives scores to departments on the basis of graduating students' satisfaction with their undergraduate courses. Compared to the newspaper league tables there are some surprising results and it will be interesting to see how applicants make use of this information in future years.

When it comes to graduate students, either at Masters or Doctoral level, few would disagree with the importance of a department's research expertise. Over the last decade all UK computer science schools have been assigned a score known as an RAE rating. The score affects a school's funding but can be difficult to interpret for applicants - a department rated 4 is not universally worse than one rated 5 since the score obtained depends on how many academics were returned. Fortunately most departments make their research expertise clear on the their website which can, of course be cross checked with the official RAE return (available at www.hero.ac.uk/rae - although now a bit out of date). A further resource is the UK measure of research intensity available at www.hesa.ac.uk/.

The final challenge that faces UK computer science departments is one that faces all computing science ‑ the rapid pace of change in the subject. For a subject that awarded its first PhD in the 1970s the development of hardware and software has been truly remarkable. Furthermore the subject is distinguished by a close relationship to industry and commerce. Such developments mean that successful departments must not only rapidly revise the syllabus but also develop courses that prepare graduates for industry. An example might be conversion courses in which students that have not had the benefit of an undergraduate degree may find that they are qualified to study for a one-year MSc known as a conversion MSc. Such courses will often admit only applicants with highly-developed graduate ­ level skills and build upon these to produce competent computer scientists within a year. Another example could be undergraduate courses that combine study with a year spent at a North American University: a cosmopolitan training that reflects the transatlantic nature of developments in computing.

So as Computer Science matures, it moves towards a subject that can more accurately be named Computing Sciences. Computing because it is not the computer that matters but the thing it computes and Sciences because there is no longer a single computer science but a diversity of theories and applications that serve the needs of a variety of disciplines. For the future therefore, I expect an increased emphasis on interdisciplinarity, more demanding quality assurance via structured student opinion and an ever-increasing range of problems that demand professional trained computer scientists to solve them.