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Comment by abdullahkhalids | Hacker News Reader

'Batch' is the term commonly used for the set of students who start a program at the same time. For instance, the CS MS batch of 2023, who are expected to finish their MS in CS in 2023 (So they all should have stared in 2021 assuming a two-year program).

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I thought it was just "class", as in "CS class of 2023"?

The term I'm looking for, though, is the set of batches abstracted over time. That is, all students who take CS at particular faculty of particular university, regardless of the year they started. A sequence of "batches". Such students will share curriculum and specific teaching staff. This is in contrast to another such group that e.g. does Applied CS at the same faculty, or Theoretical Physics at different faculty.

EDIT: perhaps a picture is in order. Imagine an university tallying up how many students started a given class on a given year, per class, across entire university. They could create a spreadsheet that looks like:

  |                        University of Example                       |
  |----------+---------------+-----------------------+-----------------|
  |          | Division of   | Division of           | Division of     |
  |          | Telecoms & EE | Robotics & Bio        | Social sciences |
  |----------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------|---------|
  | Class of | Appld | Tele  | Biomd | Appld | Auto  | Social| ...     |
  |       ↓  |  CS   |  comm | eng   |  CS   | matics| media | ...     |
  |     2022 | ###   | ###   | ###   | ###   | ###   | ###   | ...     |
  |     2021 | ###   | ###   | ###   | ###   | ###   | ###   | ...     |
  |     2020 | ###   | ###   | ###   | ###   | ###   | ###   | ...     |
  |     2019 | ###   | ###   | ###   | ###   | ###   | ###   | ...     |
  |      ... | ...   | ...   | ...   | ...   | ...   | ...   | ...     |

The term I'm looking for is the one you would use to call a single column of ### here - e.g. "all classes (years) of Applied CS in Division of Robotics and Bioinformatics".

I don't think there is one word for what you are referring to. But you could have said:

> For almost every major, scholarships were awarded to the top X% of students of that major.

Thanks, that seems closest to what I meant, perhaps exactly so. Could you look at the diagram I edited in after you posted your reply, and tell me if "major" is the right term for this?

That table was a lot of effort.

Yes, I believe "students of a major" is the best term.

I did the table in Emacs (Org Mode), so it didn't take that much of effort: Org Mode auto-aligns the table as you modify i, and has plenty of shortcuts to quickly add/remove/rearrange rows and columns :).

(I did some manual post-processing inside HN text box though, as Org Mode doesn't support having single cells spanning multiple columns or rows.)

"Graduates", maybe? As in, "the Division of Robotics and Bioinformatics Applied CS graduates."

I mean primarily current students (relative to the time point being discussed), not former students.

Possibly “alumni”?

Although that usually refers to former students, and doesn’t include current students.

Do you mean cohort or class? MBA programs in the US will use those terms.

Those are far more common.

I heard “batch” used often in grad school by my non-American classmates, but “class” seems far more common in the U.S.

I've heard cohort, batch, class and year used for both primary, secondary and higher education.

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