5b59eca1__Program_Revision_Requirements__Faculty_AB_Perspective
[Possible CSE Perspective] The same arrangement applies with respect to transfers between CS, CE, BI, and SE, and EE, Telecommunications, and IS. The proposed Faculty scheme, whereby students may enrol in a common program code in first year, and then elect which flavour of Engineering they will continue with at the end of first year, fixes this for such students (but not for IS students). However, in fact, they are likely to see much less of any particular brand of Engineering in first year, and thus are not in a very much better position to choose than at the end of secondary school. Students who don't hit the wall until part-way through second or third year - when they find a course they just cannot cope with - are no better off. [Faculty/AB Perspective] 
At present, transferring between programs within Engineering is only possible by applying through UAC. At the end of first year, such a student's application is considered on the basis of a 50% mix of their original UAI and their UNSW GPA. Students who flunked first year because the found they hated the program they were in thus end up on the garbage heap of life. Transfers between UNSW Engineering programs used to be at the discretion of the Schools involved. UNSW Central canned this arrangement a few years ago on equity grounds - they believe that this arrangement was unfair to Uni students from outside UNSW wishing to transfer into later years of UNSW Engineering courses, who had to go via UAC. In other words, they considered the possible inequity for such non-UNSW transfer applicants to be more important (legally) than the waste of human talent involved in locking UNSW students into programs they cannot pass. Many of the problems could be addressed by assessing UAC transfer applicants on the basis of max(original UAI, Uni GPA) rather than average(original UAI, Uni GPA). CSE has proposed this, but the outgoing Faculty Associate Dean (Education), A/Prof. Tim Hesketh, has responded (as I (BillW) understand him) that this is not one of the dozens of UAC admission criteria options, and that he is not prepared to pursue the possibility of proposing such a criterion as a new UAC criterion.
Faculty and Academic Board Program Revision Requirements
Faculty/AB Perspective