It’s a new year with new student representatives as well with Emma standing in for Elsa during Elsa’s study leave.
Mari Knuuttila was presenting the new pilot pathway that’s under consideration / plan.
New Pilot’s long term goal is to attract more international talent to Finland both in the form of attracting new potential students as well specialists from abroad. The impact on Aalto is going to be a tertiary path to admission into degree courses. The Pilot is being planned to start in Autumn 2022. It’s going to be open to international applicants that don’t have access to an international high school diploma and / or SAT test, students who are unsure as of yet which programme to apply for or have missed the application deadline. It will include 20-40 ects and after completion will give eligibility to Bachelor degree studies. The proposed topics will cover mathematics, Finnish language and Culture, academic and English skills. There is consideration that some of the study credits can be applied for credit transfer once accepted into a degree. The studies will be digital and it will most likely happen through Aalto summer school. It was questioned whether it’s a good idea to give pure remote grading but it was brought up that all current grades would come under suspicions if can’t trust giving out grades to the pilot. It was mentioned multiple times that Eng is on board with the project but that there’s not been the most enthusiasm from Sci. It’s also been mentioned that the acceptance criteria into the bachelors programmes needs to be determine.
Curricula:
The following proposed changes to the curricula were discussed. Replacing Basics in Programming Y1 with Programming 1, the Digital Systems and Design curriculum has implemented this change in their curriculum. This leaves Chemical Engineering as the only programme with the Python programming courses, they will consider changing to the Scala course(s) as well potentially reducing the number of programming courses needed as they feel from the degree programmes there’s.
Computational Engineering programme is going to have COE-C1001: Statics and Dynamics split into 2 courses ‘COE-C1002: Statics’ and ‘COE-C1003: Dynamics’ to facilitate this they are dropping ‘MAA-C3001 Statistical & Stochastic methods in engineering’ from their optional courses and changing ‘COE-C2001: Foundations of Continuum Mechanics’ as an optional course. This will leave the programme with a total of 65Cr in the first year and 55Cr in the second year. It has been approved from Aalto’s side as acceptable as long as it’s fairly spread over the periods and doesn’t leave a period with to heavy a load.
Quantum Technology:
PHYS-C0252: Quantum Mechanics and PHYS-C0250: Quantum Materials are getting swapped around in position with PHYS-C0252 getting taught on the first year second semester and PHYS-C0250 on the second year first semester. The swap is to facilitate an improved flow of learning as you need to have some Quantum Mechanics knowledge already while handling the material. 2 new optional courses has been added for the majour CS-C3260: Practical Quantum Computing and CS-E4680: Quantum Machine Learning.
All minors have been updated to reflect the respective majour course changes where applicable.
English language requirements for acceptance into the English degree programmes for students of admission group 1:
It’s been discussed whether there should be an entry requirement of English language on the Finnish students applying through admission group 1 to be in line with other DIA universities’ requirements. Miko did note that it is Finnish students that’s applying to an English degree programme where they can also apply / are allowed to study in the Finnish programmes. It has been noted that there is a decent number of the courses students can take in Finnish to ease the load on English skills and this can hide the fact that a student doesn’t have the required English skills needed to complete the degree and only comes to light at the time of preparing and presenting the Bachelor’s thesis. Data has been requested on the current state of the English scores related to Finnish students in admission group 1 such that it’s available if it becomes a potential issue.
Preliminary number of applications:
As has been announced the number of applications has significantly increased to all the English programmes. Even though it’s seen positively it’s been noted that the increase is most likely not purely to an increase in popularity of Aalto but rather the reduction in SAT tests needed after the College Board has stopped administering the SAT Subject tests. The subject tests likely deterred a lot of potential applicants due to not being able to get it completed within the time frame that was needed (subject tests were administered previously at around half the frequency of the SAT test).