CSE Undergraduate Curriculum: Information for Faculty

Course Information

For every course we teach, we have the following information:

Catalog descriptions: These are official 50-word descriptions and pre-requisites. It is a pain to change the descriptions, so we keep them general. On the plus side, they are really brief, so you can read our entire set of offerings in 5 minutes.
Teaching schedule: Some courses are offered every quarter, others less than once a year. You can look at schedules for previous years to get a good sense of which are which.
Course home pages: These include the public materials for each offering and who the instructor was. You invariably end up asking past instructors what really happens in the course. Links below about individual courses point to these pages.
ABET syllabi: In the materials we prepared for the ABET accreditation of our Computer Engineering program, we have syllabi for our majors courses. These were last updated in 2013. They are brief and probably less helpful than course home pages, but people looking for a list of learning outcomes can consult them. (The story behind ABET — what it is, why we do it, and how we do it — is too complicated to describe here; you can see http://www.cs.washington.edu/ABET/, but it doesn't have the “short answer” you're looking for.)
Old-timers will remember “standard syllabi” for 100-level and 300-level courses in terms of precondition concepts/abilities/skills and postcondition concepts/abilities/skills. We no longer have these (none were updated more recently than 2007, which was prior to redoing our entire 300-level majors courses around 2010), but creating new ones might be a good exercise.

Undergraduate Stages

Rough Stages in Undergraduate Coursework

Think of the courses our undergraduates take in these categories:

Our 2-quarter intro sequence (programming in Java): CSE142 and CSE143. Some students self-select to skip CSE142. These are large courses serving the broader University population. Roughly 90% of CSE142 students and 75% of CSE143 students will not end up CSE majors. Some of our majors took these courses before intending to be CSE majors.

Our other 100-level courses are primarily intended for non-majors although our majors do sometimes take them, particularly CSE154 (web programming).
Our 300-level courses are taken during students' first few quarters in the major. In 2010-2011 we transitioned to a new set of courses, with new numbers and substantially new and rearranged content. It used to be that all 300-level courses were required of all majors. Now there are still 4 300-level courses that everyone must take, others that either CompE or CS students must take, and still others that nobody must take. However, “not required” does not mean “unimportant”. Not-required courses can still be highly recommended courses taken by the vast majority of students. They can be pre-requisites for important 400-level courses.
Most of our 400-level courses are “senior-level courses” in various “areas.” Students take at least 4 of these, but usually more like 7-9. Most 400-level courses don't have other 400-level courses as pre-requisites.
Capstone Design Courses and Project Courses (both also at the 400-level) are courses where students synthesize what they have learned by designing, implementing, evaluating, and presenting. A Capstone Design Course must meet many of the ABET assessment requirements, whereas a Project Course need not, though for many years we referred to both as “capstones” and are trying to move away from this confusing terminology. CompE students must take at least one Capstone Design Course, but we recommend CS students take one too.
Relevant requirements outside the school (e.g., math courses, writing requirements, etc.)
Relevant electives outside the school. For courses in other departments that count toward CSE elective requirements, see this official list.
Other: Those are just the broad categories. We also have:
- Courses not at the 100-level that are for non-majors and which have at least CSE143 as a pre-requisite. The largest is CSE373 Data Structures. Other courses cover algorithms, artificial intelligence, data management, machine learning, programming languages, computer systems, and more.
- Advanced undergraduates who, with instructor permission, take graduate courses.
- Independent studies, senior theses, etc. Have an advisor explain the difference between CSE498a, CSE498b, and CSE499.
- Seminars (usually pass-fail and just 1 or 2 credits)
- Other stuff

Degrees

Degrees and Degree Requirements

We have two undergraduate degree programs: A Computer Science major in the College of Arts & Sciences (“CS”) and a Computer Engineering major in the College of Engineering (“CompE” or “CE”). The degree requirements are different, both within CSE, and, more substantially, outside of CSE (to satisfy the colleges' different requirements). Most faculty can ignore this: you never need to know who in your class is in which college. Our CompE degree is ABET accredited, which complicates how we structure our CompE degree requirements and how we assess our curricular goals. Currently, over 80% of our undergraduate majors are CS.

The degree requirements have all the details and are complicated enough that it's unwise to try to summarize them. The CS and CompE requirements are in separate PDF files and you are probably more interested in the right columns, which contain the CSE courses.

We also have an integrated 5th-year Master's program (“BS/MS” or “5th years”) where students are admitted prior to their senior year and stay for roughly an extra year to earn a Master's degree. The early admission allows them to plan their final two years together. Students in the BS/MS who have finished their Bachelor's requirements often refer to themselves as graduate studentsb and they are graduate students. They take both 400-level and 500-level courses. Approximately 10% of our undergraduates participate in this program.

A few historical facts, not necessarily relevant going forward:

In 2015, we completed a revision of the CompE requirements that better aligns with the Electrical & Computer Engineering department so that students in both CSE and EE (the ECE department's degree program is still Electrical Engineering at this time) have more electives available and the we can better share teaching cycles. The details of this change are in a separate section below.
Prior to Spring 2011, CompE had separate tracks in Hardware and Software, but at that time we agreed to more flexible Computer Engineering degree requirements that subsume both tracks (i.e., students can now mix-and-match between what were the tracks).
Prior to Spring 2010, the 300-level courses were almost entirely different and the same courses were required for CS and CompE.
It's pretty neat that our web pages have all versions of our degree requirements back to 1977.

The 300-level

Here is our current collection of “300-level” courses and their pre-requisite structure. This reflects the CompE updates in 2015 and is current as of February 2019:

that picture
Grossman always shows everyone

Course web pages:

Back in 2010, we also developed a 2-3 page course description that explains the vision, goals, and approximate topics of each new course. Naturally, converting a short description into a 4-credit course is non-trivial and courses evolve over time, so at this point, these descriptions are historical documents. But since they aren't linked to anywhere else, here they are:

Course Prerequisites

Prerequisites for courses at the 400-level should be up to the relevant cadre of instructors. The current list may be suboptimal. If so, please speak up and suggest changes. However, keep in mind:

If at all possible, agree on pre-requisites with all other instructors. It is problematic at best for the students and advisors when different instructors assume different pre-requisites in general. (A particular student in an unusual circumstance, however, can always be handled specially with your support and help.)
Most of our 400-level courses have only 300-level courses as pre-requisites. “Deeper chains” do exist and should exist if pedagogically optimal, but it makes it more difficult for students to take the course before graduation. Similarly, require all 300-level courses that are important for offering a substantial, successful course, but pre-requisites that are not required courses can have some negative pressure on enrollment in a course.

Learning More

Confused about how our curriculum works? Ask a colleague or one of our wonderful undergraduate advisors. It is a system with a lot of moving parts where nobody has complete information — but together we make it work to graduate hundreds of great students a year.

Big 2015 Changes

In Spring 2015, we completed a 2-3 year process to align several courses with Electrical Engineering in order to make more senior-level courses available to majors in both CSE and EE and to share teaching burden.

The biggest change is to remove CSE352 (4 credits), our first “hardware lab” course and replace it with CSE369 (2 credits) and CSE/EE 371 (5 credits, cross-listed). CSE369 is a “bridge” course that builds on the circuits and finite-automata in CSE311 to cover enough “lab skills” to have our students take 371 while the EE students take EE 271 before 371. This is a key point of coordination -- from 371 students can “launch” in different directions toward computer architecture, embedded systems, etc.

The other changes, in rough order of importance:

Embedded systems changes from CSE 466 to CSE/EE 474 (cross-listed with a common number). The pre-reqs drop to just CSE 143 because that's important to EE. We navigate this by having students without C experience participate in a [second weekly] recitation section on C programming. Students who have taken CSE351, CSE374, or CSE410 probably will not need this optional section, which we will make clear on the time schedule.
Computer architecture, which was much of CSE352 and all of CSE471, splits into CSE/EE 469 Computer Architecture I and CSE/EE 470 Computer Architecture II.
The embedded systems capstone is renumbered to CSE/EE 475 for number-consistency across CSE and EE.
We removed CSE468 and CSE476 from the course catalog (we haven't taught them in ages). CSE students with the right pre-reqs will be able to take VLSI courses EE476 and EE477.
As a bookkeeping convenience, we moved a long list of courses out of the degree requirements to a web page. Future changes to this list will still need faculty approval, but will not require a university-level process. This is the Computer Engineering Systems Electives list.

Big 2010 Changes

This is for historical purposes and for when an old-timer reverts to thinking in pre-2010 terms and needs a refresher.

In Fall 2009, we approved a major revision of our 300-level courses. It retired 7 courses: CSE303, CSE321, CSE322, CSE326, CSE370, CSE378. While CSE341 remained, it became recommended rather than required.

The 300-level revision changed what material is included and reorganized the material. Here is a high-level list of notable changes:

CSE303 went away. The Linux skills, makefiles, and such moved to 391, a 1-credit non-required credit/no-credit course. Most students take this course, but students who learned these tools on their own can skip it.
CSE311 draws on material from CSE321 (logic, induction, discrete math), CSE322 (finite state machines, undecidability), and CSE370 (boolean logic, finite state machines). Compared to 321, the counting and probability moves to CSE312 whereas CSE311 does more to cover topics essential to hardware that were previously in CSE370.
CSE312 is very different from CSE322, most of the material from CSE322 moves to CSE311 or disappears from the 300-level (instructors for CSE401, CSE421, and CSE431 should take particular note). CSE312 covers computing applications of probability and statistics, as well as P vs. NP and NP-completeness. (In 2014-2015, the P vs. NP and NP-Completeness moved to CSE332, where it is closer to the other course material.)
CSE331 provides substantial software-project and software-design/implementation experience in Java. This is a more substantial exposure to high-level software development, including specifications, testing, and design patterns, than anything pre-revision.
CSE332 removed about 2-3 weeks on less common data structures and algorithms to make room for parallelism (using more processors to increase throughput) and concurrency (controlling access to shared resources). This is done at a high level, for example in Java with locks and lightweight threads. (In 2014-2015, the concurrency piece beyond a contrast with parallelism moved to CSE333.)
CSE344 is a new course that will led to a revised CSE444. It lets students interested in using databases and other data-management tools have a useful course and then let CSE444 focus on designing/implementing database-management systems.
CSE351 is not a hardware course, focusing instead on exposing students to the key levels of the system stack below Java (C, assembly, O/S, hardware) and how they connect to each other. There is no lab.
CSE352 is a lab-intensive hardware course, drawing on hardware material previously covered in CSE370 and CSE378, as well as putting more emphasis on embedded systems and systems integration. As a trade-off, there is less material on processor design and virtual memory at the 300-level. (It went away in the 2015 CompE revision.)
CSE333 is a new course to provide more significant systems-programming experience (in C and C++). Whereas CSE351 is less “about C” than CSE303 was, CSE333 has CSE351 as a pre-req and will focus on systems-level software. It has aspects of teaching C/C++ programming but also aspects of teaching systems-software issues like performance, IO, and asynchrony. (In ~2014, CSE333 took on an introduction to concurrency and synchronization when it left CSE332. Earlier than that, CSE333 became a pre-req for CSE451.)
Not requiring STAT390/391 (while requiring CSE312 instead). STAT391 gained special status as a CSE core course and later (~2014) gained a CSE312 pre-req.
CompE students used to have to take EE215 and the hardware track also had to take EE233. Those are both still options, but as a replacement we encourage EE205 Signal Conditioning. We feel EE205 is a better match for what CompE students need, but EE215/233 is also suitable and can work better for double-majors or for scheduling reasons (since EE205 is offered only once a year).