2019/20

Reports from student surveys and lecturer responses

This page presents feedback from students about their experience on Informatics courses, to help future students in their course choices. There are also responses from the lecturers. Please note that lecturers regularly revise course content and presentation from year to year — often directly in response to exactly this feedback.

Do not redistribute or reuse this material without permission. If you would like another format or want to use it in your own publication then please contact the Informatics Teaching Organisation.

Feedback reports

The most recent feedback is from 2019/20, and covers 32 courses at all levels in the School of Informatics. Please note that not all courses run every year and course content changes from year to year. See the Course Index for current details of all courses offered.  Also due to the COVID-19 pandemic, surveys for Semester 2 courses were cancelled centrally by the University, so unfortunately no feedback is available for these courses.

The tables below bring together over 500 individual submissions from students, gathered through an online survey at the end of semester 1. Each course lecturer has been invited to write a response, and these are linked alongside the student feedback.

The published reports contain free-text responses by students about their experience of each course and recommendations to others planning their studies. Each course organiser receives this report as well as statistics on multiple-choice responses. All these reports, together with student feedback about individual members of teaching staff, are collected and sent to the Director of Teaching.

Please note that these are personal responses from individual students: some courses have a low response rate, and a small sample can be unrepresentative. To find out more about each course yourself, go to the index at http://course.inf.ed.ac.uk and browse the current course web pages.

Each year we remove responses that contain offensive language or otherwise breach the University Dignity and Respect policy. In 2019/20 there were four responses removed for offensive language, and seven responses edited to remove personally identifying details. There was no other editing or selection of results before publication.

Notes on the tables

The word (new) after a lecturer name indicates a change in the staff teaching a course.

Courses are grouped by year taken. Note that many honours courses may be taken in a choice of years: these are listed as Year 3/4 or Year 4/5/MSc as appropriate.

Viewing each feedback report requires DICE authentication: you must have an School of Informatics user account to log in and download these.

Year 1 courses (Level 8)

Year 2 courses (Level 8)

Year 3 courses (Level 9)

Course Name	2020/21 Lecturer	2019/20 Feedback	Lecturer Response
Informatics Large Practical	Gilmore / Jackson	report (Gilmore / Jackson)	2019/20 Response - ILP (58.29 KB PDF)
Introductory Applied Machine Learning	Mac Aodha (new) / Shimodaira (new) / Williams	report (UG) (Williams / Storkey) report (PGT)(Williams / Storkey)	2019/20 Response - IAML (55.31 KB PDF)
Introduction to Vision and Robotics	Khadem	report (Khadem) report (Distance Learning) (Khadem)	2019/20 Response - IVR/IVR-DL (52.64 KB PDF)

Year 3/4 courses (Level 10)

Course Name	2020/21 Lecturer	2019/20 Feedback	Lecturer Response
Compiling Techniques	NOT RUNNING IN 2020/21	report (Dubach)
Professional Issues	S. Anderson / Garforth (new)	report (S. Anderson)
Software Design and Modelling	NOT RUNNING IN 2020/21	report (Stevens)	2019/20 Response - SDM (47.19 KB PDF)

Year 4/5/MSc courses (Level 11)

Course Name	2020/21 Lecturer	2019/20 Feedback	Lecturer Response
Computational Complexity	Guo / Etessami (new)	report (Guo)
Extreme Computing	NOT RUNNING IN 2020/21	report (Seeker / Bhatotia)
Human-Computer Interaction	Constantin / Vaniea	report (Constantin / Vaniea )
Introduction to Quantum Computing	Wallden / Sanchez (new)	report (Wallden)
Machine Learning & Pattern Recognition	Murray / Onken	report (Murray / Onken)	2019/20 Response - MLPR (35.47 KB PDF)
Natural Computing	Herrmann	report (Herrmann) report (Distance Learning) (Herrmann)	2019/20 Response - NAT/NAT-DL (27.98 KB PDF)
Performance Modelling	NOT RUNNING IN 2020/21	report (Hillston) report (Distance Learning) (Hillston)	2019/20 Response - PM-DL (36.34 KB PDF) 2019/20 Response - PM (50.11 KB PDF)
Secure Programming	NOT RUNNING IN 2020/21	report (Aspinall)
Types and Semantics for Programming Languages	NOT RUNNING IN 2020/21	report (Wadler)
Usable Security and Privacy	NOT RUNNING IN 2020/21	report (Vaniea)

Year 5/MSc courses

Most MSc study is at Level 11. However, MSc students may take up to 30 credit points of Level 9 and Level 10 courses. Those are listed in the sections above for Year 3 and Year 4.