Responsibilities of Teaching Assistants

Hugh C. Lauer
Teaching Professor

This document outlines some of your responsibilities as TAs for the CS-2303 course. Your responsibilities fall into four main areas:–

  1. Supervising laboratory sessions
  2. Holding office hours and monitoring the class discussion list
  3. Grading programming assignments and providing timelyfeedback to students
  4. Participating the grading of quizzes

These are expanded below.

Laboratory Sessions

There are three laboratory sections, all of which meet on Wednesdays in Kaven 203. Section A01 meets at 9:00 AM, and Section A02 meets at 10:00 AM, and Section A03 meets at noon.There are currently more seats available in the three lab sections than there are in the classroom.

You will be in complete charge of the lab sessions; I do not normally attend. At least two of you are needed for each lab session, but it won't hurt to have three at the start of the course. You need to work out your lab hours among yourselves and tell mewhich sessions you will be supervising.

The most important things for you to do during the lab are

a)help students with any difficulties, and

b)get to know the students by name. In particular, I want you to form impressions of their abilities, issues, problems, etc. At the end of the term, I will ask you for a subjective assessment of each student in the class prior to assigning a grade.

You will, of course, need to be familiar with the lab assignments from the course web site prior to the lab sessions.

Students are required to attend lab sessions and sign in.You should provide a sign-in sheet. They must complete and submit the lab assignment by midnight the same day. Each student is graded one point for attendance and one point for submission. For lab assignments, you don’t need to compile and grade the assignment itself. You only need to keep a record of who turned in assignments and who did not.

This term, I intend to try something new. If a student already knows the lab materials and has completed the lab assignment before the lab session, he or she may earn an extra lab point by helping the TAs to help others. I will ask such students to make themselves known to you. You should ask each one whether he/she has submitted the lab assignment, and then observe them helping others. Please make a note of this on the sign-in sheet.

This term, we are blessed with lab seats than classroom seats. An extra lab session was added this summer to accommodate a large waitlist, and the extra lab session starts at noon. I will work out some sort of lottery or other fair means of allowing students to officially sign up for the noon session (which still have free seats in it). However, this means that students who are officially listed for an earlier session cannot simply sleep in and then show up for a later one. Any such student must yield his/her seat to a student who is officially listed for that session. (Of course, there may be extra seats due to students helping each other or due to legitimate absences.)

Office Hours and Class Discussion List

You are responsible for holding office hours at designated times each week. Graduate TAs (teaching assistants) should hold office hours four hours per week. Undergraduate SAs (student assistants) should hold office hours two hours per week.

Your office hours should normally be in the “bullpen” — i.e., Fuller Labs A22. Please discuss with me if you wish to hold office hours at another location.

CS-2303 students generally prefer office hours in the afternoons and evenings, rather than in the mornings. It is best to hold office hours at different hours of different days of the week, so as to increase the overall availability of TAs. It is also best to avoid scheduling your office hours at the same time as those of another TA or SA of this course.

You should also take turns monitoring the class e-mail list and the discussion board, especially in the evenings. The Professor strongly encourages students to ask technical questions on the e-mail list and for other students to answer. It is entirely appropriate, for example, for a student to e-mail to the list saying

“Here is a fragment of my program, and I am getting the following strange behavior. What is going wrong?”

You or another student should respond to the entire list with suggestions or insights.

Incidentally, I monitor the e-mail list as part of my subjective assessments of students.

Grading Programming Assignments

Your biggest job is to grade the programming assignments and to provide feedback to students in a timely manner. Timely means that students should have feedback on an assignment at least one day before the next assignment is due.

Prior to the due date of an assignment, you (as a group) must do several things:–

  • Prepare a grading template (i.e., a text file) from the rubric provided in each assignment specification. You should submit your template to the professor for approval at least a day before the assignment is due. All of you will use the same template for a given assignment. An example of a template (with the student’s grades already filled in) is shown in the Appendix of this document.
  • Divide up the class among yourselves. TAs and SAs grade the number of assignment submissions in the ratio of two-to-one. Therefore, for this CS-2303 course, each TA will grade ~33% of the submissions, and the SA will grade ~16% of the submissions.

Do not grade the same students every week. That is, rotate your share of the grading from week to week, so that you grade one group of students the first week, a different group the second week, etc. It is easiest for the professor if you divide the students into groups alphabetically by e-mail ID, so that each grader has a contiguous group.

Students will submit assignment via the web-based Turnin system. Your login ID is the same as your WPI login ID, and you will get a “password message” when the course is configured on this Turnin system. I will create “assignments” in the Turnin system and will specify due dates. Late submissions will automatically be flagged.

Each student is entitled to one late assignment of at most 24 hours — i.e., the freebie. After that, late assignments are penalized 25% of the total point value of the assignment for the first 24 hours. Assignments that are more than 24 hours late are graded zero (unless the Professor makes a specific exception for a specific student.) You will need to keep a cumulative record of which students have used their freebies and which have not.

Shortly after the due date of an assignment, you should download the submissions that you are grading and attempt to compile and build them. If a student’s submission does not build, please try to contact the student by e-mail and indicate the problem. If the student responds quickly with a fix, you may count it as late and apply the freebie policy. If not, the student gets a zero for the assignment. Don’t forget to check again after 24 hours for late submissions.

After you have compiled all of the students’ submissions, go back and test them and grade them according to the rubric. You should consult among yourselves in order to make the grading as uniform as possible.

Finally, after you have graded all of your submissions, please prepare a zip file of the grade sheets, along with a tally of the grades of your group, and e-mail them to me. Be sure to include grade sheets for all students who get zero grades. I give you an “okay,” you may upload them to the Turnin system.

Grading Quizzes

This term, we will have weekly quizzes, typically on Fridays. After each quiz, we will have a group grading session. These typically last about 1.5–2 hours. We will try to set up the grading session to accommodate your schedules. Please set aside enough hours to complete the grading.

It is my practice to grade all quiz papers for one question by one grader, to ensure uniform grading of each question. Exam papers will be passed around the table until all questions of all papers are graded and all exam scores are tallied.

Appendix

Here is an example of a grading sheet from last year:–

Programming Assignment 4 (PA4) (45 pts)

CS 2303

C-TERM 2010

Name: <student’s name>

Username: <student’s e-mail ID>

------

Compilation in VS2008 without warnings __5/5__

Correct definition of class and methods for nodes of binary __5/5__

tree

Correct definition of class and methods for the binary tree __5/5__

as a whole

Correct construction of binary tree and insertion of nodes __5/5__

Correct traversal of binary tree and output of information __5/5__

according to specified format

Proper destruction of tree and all of its objects before __10/10__

exiting

Correct execution with graders' test cases __5/5__

Satisfactory README file, including output of two test cases __5/5__

PENALTY: Not clean or not in a ZIP file __0/-5__

Subtotal: __45/45__

------

If this space is checked ____ your submission was late with no penalty.(first excuse)

If this space is checked ____ your submission was late with a 25%

penalty.

Reason for grade of zero (if applicable):--

____ no submission

____ program fails to compile

____ other (specify) ______

------

Total: __45/45__

Graded By: Your Name ()

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