Fall 2008 Revisions to CS Graduate Concentrations

We are happy to announce that effective Fall 2008 we have revised the General, Software Engineering, Computing in Life Sciences concentrations in our Master of Science in Computer Science (MS CS) program. We feel these improvements make the program more flexible, and ensure better coverage of modern and relevant topics. The total number of units, as well as the structure and names of concentrations have not changed. The newly announced Master of Sicence Concentration in Computing and Business has not changed.

Students already in the program can elect to apply either the current or new bulletin requirements. Current students should see their graduate advisor for details on how this is done.

To apply to our graduate program go to http://cs.sfsu.edu/grad/GradApply.html

Following is a brief summary of the changes. For details please check the official bulletin.

Changes in Computer Systems Core requirements: We have added CSC 720 Advanced Operating Systems as an option to our Computer Systems Core Requirements, which now has CSC 720, CSC 835 and CSC 846. This change provides an additional topic in this important area. This change applies to all MS CS concentrations, since core requirements are common to all of them. Also, CSC 868, originally called Object Oriented Programming, has been renamed to CSC 868 Advanced Object Oriented Design and Development and its syllabus and course topics are changed accordingly. This course will fill the gap we had in covering high-level OO architectures, design patterns etc.

In the MS CS General Concentration, instead of requiring students to take three 3-unit courses from a set of five predetermined and fixed courses, we now allow students to take any three 3-unit courses from the CSC 700-800 level courses.

In MS CS Concentration in SW Engineering we made the following changes:

a)	Both CSC 848 Advanced SW Engineering and CSC 868 Advanced Object Oriented Design and Development are mandatory; previously, only CSC 848 was mandatory.
b)	To keep the total number of units the same, we reduced the elective requirement from two 3-unit courses to one 3-unit course.
c)	We increased the flexibility and coverage of the SE concentration core from three fixed CSC 3-unit courses to now consist of: CSC 840 Software Metrics and Quality Assurance; ISYS 663 Information Technology Project Management (offered by the ISYS Department at SFSU) and the choice of one course from a set of five designated 3-unit CS graduate courses.

In MS CS Concentration in Computing for Life Sciences we made the following changes:

a)	CSC 810 is a mandatory core course from the Computing Foundation area;
b)	We increased the flexibility and coverage of the SE concentration core by replacing CSC 730 Database Systems with a choice of one out of a set of four designated 3-unit CS graduate courses

We are very excited about these changes and we strongly believe that they will enhance our MS program, making it more relevant and more flexible.