[This Tutor/TA/Grader Guide presents an overview of possible job duties and advice. Details vary from course to course and from quarter to quarter, so consult the instructor of your course for definitive information.]

Tutor/Grader/TA Guide

We hope this guide will serve as a reference for your activities and responsibilities as a tutor, grader, or TA for our introductory courses. Please let us know if you think of other things we should add to it.

1. Before the quarter starts
   
   • You should have these written materials
     
     • First-day handout set
       
       • Course reference sheet, including course outline, readings, and due dates. This is available on the Web through eee.uci.edu or from the instructor's home page.
         
       • ICS cheating policy and any policies specific to the instructor of the course
         
       • Enrollment procedures document, if necessary
         
     • Lab Assignments (the Lab Manual), also available on the web.
       
     • This guide
       
     • "TA Secret Sheet," for TAs and graders: This contains passwords and other sensitive information.
       
     • Textbooks are (or soon will be) available for TAs to check out from the department library.
       
   • Read these documents thoroughly; they state policies your students (and you) are bound by.
     
   • If you don't have one already, obtain a UCInet ID and also an ICS Lab Account.
     
   • Students submit their work electronically via Checkmate (checkmate.ics.uci.edu); the instructor should set you up for access if necessary.
   
   
2. During the first week
   
   • Check your electronic mail frequently. We will announce meetings, schedule changes, new policies, and so on; your students will suffer if you don't have the up-do-date information. Get into this habit now, and keep it throughout the quarter. (This applies to lab tutors, graders, and TAs.)
     
   • TAs should take attendance in section. If someone enrolled doesn't show up to either of the first two section meetings, we may require them to drop to make room for others; thus we must have accurate records of who was there.
     
   • Students new to UCI may not be familiar with the lab environment. If you find this is a serious problem for many students, we can get some introductory materials from the instructors of the introductory courses.
     
   • TAs and graders should mark their calendars for the afternoons and evenings following the midterm and final exams. We will get together and do all the grading of all the exams at that single time; things go fastest and most smoothly that way. TAs and the instructor will meet again the following morning to set the final grades. Every TA must do his or her part for this process to run smoothly. In particular, this means that all of your labs must be graded, recorded, and submitted to me in electronic form by the start of the final exam. Since you know this now, please arrange your own exam studying to accommodate these constraints.
     
     
3. At every lab session
   
   • Be on time. Students depend on having you there at the scheduled time.
     
   • Make yourself available to the students: Even if the students all seem busy, don't read your own e-mail, don't IM your friends, don't make cellphone calls, don't do your own classwork, because students will hesitate to interrupt you. When you're in the lab, you should circulate around and help students, not simply wait for them to call on you. Don't get so deeply involved in conversations that you don't notice when students need help; you should cruise around the room at least once every five minutes. Whenever you're in the instructional lab, you should be prepared to answer students' questions courteously, even if you aren't officially on duty at that time. It's insulting to tell a student, "I'm not even supposed to be here now," even if it's technically true. You may be able to work with fewer interruptions in the Open Lab (ICS 364).
     
   • Be prepared to answer students' questions. Presumably you already know the subject matter, but you must also know the assignments. The only way to do that effectively is to read them carefully in advance and, where possible, try to work them out. If a student asks whether something is important or required, you want to be certain that you're giving the right answer (and check with the TA or instructor if there's a question that the assignment writeup doesn't answer clearly): If you give a wrong answer on something like this, the student may be graded down, and that's not a happy situation.
     
   • Give students help, not answers. It's fine to tell people how to solve system-related problems, but you should lead them to their own solutions of programming and CS problems. They shouldn't become dependent on you; they should learn how to use manuals, extra print statements, and execution traces for themselves. Be pleasant but ruthless about this. Students will beg you for a quick-fix answer, and it's easier for you just to give it than to point them towards finding the solution themselves. Nonetheless, resist the temptation, because students will come to expect you to fix their problems for them. In the long run, that hurts both them and you.
     
   • Don't feel guilty if you can't immediately identify the student's bug. While most of us can see bugs quickly for the early, trivial assignments, that may lead students to expect (unrealistically) that we'll always be able to find and fix their problems at a glance. Of course nobody can do that for significant programs, and TAs and tutors need to make this clear to students, by explaining it in section and by encouraging them to find their own bugs by adding extra print statements and tracing their code. (You may have to show some students how to do this step by step the first time; not everybody knows how to debug instinctively.) If a student objects to the painstaking work involved in such tracing, remind them that they can minimize the need for it by spending more time in the design phase.
     
   • Remind students to prepare for lab by reading and thinking about the assignment beforehand; they should be ready to work when they sit down at the machine.
     
   • Help whomever you can. Don't be shy about helping someone who's not in the class you're officially tutoring for. By the same token, don't feel embarrassed if you don't know all the details of their assignments; it's perfectly fair to ask them to speak with their own class's TA or tutor if that person will have details that you don't.
     
   • Spread yourself around to everyone rather than concentrating on just a few. If many people want you at once, leave the current person with a task to do independently while you make the rounds. Make sure each student gets at least "first aid" help so they can get back to work; after that, feel free to spend more in-depth time with students who need it. (Avoid even joking about things like only paying attention to the cutest students; some people won't take it as a joke.)
     
   • Maintain decorum in the lab: Don't shout across the room to someone (or let students do so); gently calm down students who get too rowdy or frustrated. Have students using sound-producing software keep the volume low or off. Students listening to music on the CD-ROM drives must use their own headphones.
     
   • If problems arise with a student, try to deal with it calmly yourself. If that doesn't work, contact the lab manager or the instructor. In extreme cases, call the campus police (this has never been necessary in the past, though). If you suspect cheating or other major infractions of University rules, contact the instructor directly with as much hard evidence as you can; you should not attempt to handle academic dishonesty issues yourself.
   
   
4. Weekly during the quarter
   
   • TAs must attend weekly meetings where we can compare notes on lecture and assignments.
   
   
5. Periodically during the quarter
   
   • Check your electronic mail at least once daily. Good communication is essential.
     
   • Read official Email course announcements. OAC's Electronic Educational Environment (eee.uci.edu) provides each course with an automatically maintained mailing list of enrolled students. As the instructor sends announcements to this list, you will receive copies in your Email. All such messages are archived; the URL is available on the course home page.
     
   • Keep in touch with the instructor in person or electronically. Let us know how things are going, and especially if anything's going wrong. It's much easier (and more effective) to correct problems early, before they get out of hand. Graders and lab tutors especially are on the "front lines" dealing with students' difficulties; we need to know what those difficulties are.
     
   • Keep track of your students, watching for those who aren't coming to section, who wait too long to start on their assignments, or who otherwise aren't doing well; if you encourage them into good work and study habits early, you may save them from a sorry fate later on.
     
     • Students with no previous experience often feel intimidated by the more experienced students, especially in the early weeks when they still need to learn the system and they see the experienced students furiously typing away. Be sure to encourage the novices to start early and ask questions; reassure them that their difficulties are normal and help foster their feeling that they can complete the work and do well.
       
     • Very experienced students have other problems: Often they think they can wait until the last minute to complete assignments; this may be true for the first few assignments, but significant programs take substantial time, even for people who understand the concepts. Experienced students also may not be used to following rigid specs imposed by someone else. Recreational programmers can just change the requirements, but our students have to solve the hard problems rather than working around them.
       
   • TAs should collect photos and questionnaires from the students who haven't submitted them yet. Some students have to be reminded repeatedly until they finally comply. You'll need to enter some of the questionnaire data onto your grade spreadsheet.
     
   • Tutors and graders can't be paid for any work they do until their employment paperwork has been completed, approved, and processed; check with Carol Rapp (rapp@ics.uci.edu) for the precise date. Tutors and graders should submit their time sheets to the instructor for signature. It's particularly important that your time sheet reflect any days you missed or showed up late; if your time sheet claims time you weren't actually there, the university thinks you're trying to cheat it out of its money and gets seriously upset. Tutors and graders are hourly employees; we try to keep the hours per week consistent, but there may be fewer assigned at the start of the quarter and more near the end or near important due dates. Tutors and graders aren't guaranteed a specific minimum number of hours; you get paid for the hours you are actually assigned and actually work.
     
     
6. At the end of the quarter
   
   • TAs return your checked-out textbooks.
     
   • We'd appreciate it if you'd send us a written commentary about your experiences as a tutor, grader, or TA, with suggestions for improving any aspect of the course. We do change the course based on these comments.
   
   
7. TA-specific responsibilities
   
   • Attend lecture if at all possible, especially for the coverage of topics that you haven't seen before. You should know what policy announcements we make and what content we emphasize.
     
   • Lead your discussion sections and lab sections as scheduled.
     
     • We'll seldom ask you to cover new material, except for system details (like using the environment or other tools) during the first week.
       
     • Answer questions on the course material (see below).
       
     • Go over homeworks, lab assignments, and exams.
       
   • Encourage questions as they arise; students should get in the habit of asking regularly rather than saving them up until right before exams or due dates. Don't just say, "Are there any questions?" Often students are hesitant to ask or can't articulate exactly what they don't understand. Instead, ask the class how to do a specific task or how to work a specific problem. If many students clamor to give the answer, you can feel comfortable with their comprehension; if not, you have some explaining to do.
     
   • If they don't ask you, ask them. When you ask for questions and get no response, ask the students to do some problem, either in their seats (perhaps in pairs) or at the board. Come to class with a handful of different problems; if they range in difficulty, then some of them are bound to elicit questions from the class.
     
   • Attend scheduled lab hours. Your time in the lab is a chance for you to see how well your students really understand the material.
     
   • Set office hours. Besides the hours of discussion and the hours jof scheduled lab, plan a couple more hours of student contact, where students can ask questions in private and you can have longer meetings. Schedule one or two office hours (and publicize the time and place to your students more than once) and budget 1-2 hours for reading and answering electronic mail from students.
     
   • Collect snapshots of your students so you can learn their names. Usually we make this part of the first assignment. You should learn names not only because students will learn better if they know you know them by name, but also because you'll be able to identify any non-students who try to come and take an exam in a real student's place. You may have to nag students to give you a photo, but if you keep after them they'll eventually do it.
     
   • Collect the demographic questionnaires from your students (or download them from the Survey tool at EEE if they're administered electronically). These contain information (like experience level) that you'll add to your electronic rollbook, and that we'll use in considering final grades. Again, keep after your students until you have a questionnaire from each of them.
     
   • Keep your grade spreadsheet up-to-date. We will distribute a template spreadsheet for you to keep your grades with. It is vital that you use our template, and that you fill in the appropriate columns from the demographic questionnaires. You can get up-to-date "web rosters" of your section from EEE; once your enrollment stabilizes, use this to provide the main data for your spreadsheet. From time to time we'll ask you to submit copies of your spreadsheet, so we can make sure it's in the right form. (This is important because it saves hours of work at a critical time right before we assign final grades.) Finally, don't keep your official copy of your grade spreadsheet on any computer that students use, and do keep good backups—imagine what a disaster it would be if you lost your students' grades.
     
   • Handle various administrative and pedagogical tasks as they're assigned, usually during weekly staff meetings. These may include preparing test data, examples, or review questions.
     
   • For more information on being a TA, talk to David Kay or the Instructional Resource Center office on campus (www.irc.uci.edu, phone extension 46188).
     
     
8. Grading guidelines
   
   • TAs are responsible for grading homeworks and lab assignments, possibly with the assistance of a grader. You may choose whatever reasonable grading criteria you like, consistent with the lab manual and the guidelines below, so long as you inform your students in advance about how you will evaluate their work. Whenever you make requirements, clarifications, or grading criteria specific to your sections, in addition to announcing them frequently in section you should send them to your sections' mailing list and make sure your grader is aware of each requirement, clarification, or criterion you make. Students are most frustrated when they don't know how they'll be graded, or when they think they were graded on criteria they didn't know about. Giving specific written criteria is the best approach. We will be happy to provide further guidance on this.
     
   • Whoever actually grades the papers should discuss the grading criteria (with the instructor or TA, as appropriate) to make sure you understand just how the problems should be graded. Is the purpose of the problem to measure the student's mastery (as on a quiz) or just to give the student experience with the problem (as on some homeworks)? In the latter case, you might not worry as much about taking off points as about explaining what the mistakes are. When one person makes the requirements and a different person is in charge of enforcing them (though grading), the potential for inconsistency is great; it's vital to take every step you can to stay consistent.
     
   • Even though you have an answer key, work through all the problems yourself before starting to grade. This is not much fun, but it's the only way you can get a feel for all the points being tested and the difficulties involved in doing the problem.
     
   • Don't be rigid when grading—it's often possible to have a solution that's correct (or nearly correct) even if it looks crazy at first glance. Try to figure out what the student meant, and where he or she went wrong; don't just mark something wrong because it doesn't match the answer key precisely. But don't supply answers that aren't there—the student must communicate to you; you can't be clairvoyant.
     
   • Grade consistently—People who show the same level of mastery should receive the same number of points. Students always compare their graded papers with their classmates', and nothing makes them legitimately unhappier than losing three points when someone else lost two for the same thing. Take special pains to grade consistently, including the following:
     
     • Grade vertically: A single person (TA or grader) must grade every student's work on a particular question or assignment. It's fine to have one person grade the assignments for correctness and another for style, but except for multiple choice questions there's no way to keep grades consistent by splitting the same work (e.g., when one person does A-M and the other does N-Z). Grading vertically also means it's best for a single grader to grade everyone's Problem One, then everyone's Problem Two, and so on; it's easier to remember your criteria that way.
       
     • Keep notes of the partial-credit criteria you use. This helps not only during the grading, but later on when students come back with questions. It's especially important for later projects and the final exam, when it's not you but the instructor who will have to field the students' grading questions.
       
     • Recheck the papers you graded first, because your criteria probably will shift during the course of the grading.
       
     • Shuffle the stack after each pass, so you don't grade the same student first (or last) on every question.
       
     • Once some papers are graded, recheck the criteria by showing some of the graded work to the instructor or TA as appropriate; this is another way to avoid discrepancies between the requirements and the grading.
       
   • Remember that there are people behind the papers you're grading. Make all your comments helpful and constructive. Explain where the student did well, or went wrong. (You may want to make a list of generally applicable comments for distribution to the class rather than laboriously copying the same comment onto many individual papers.) It's best not to grade in red pen; a paper bathed in red is pretty jarring. Try to avoid giving zero points, except for a completely blank answer (or a problem worth just a small number of points). One point out of ten, even for a completely wrong answer, isn't as discouraging as a zero (and having 10% instead of 0% won't significantly affect a final grade). You can't be so generous with problems that have fewer than ten points, of course.
     
   • Having assignments and exams returned promptly is absolutely imperative—people can't study for a test without their homeworks, and they can't do projects without seeing their previous mistakes corrected. Education experts say that the value of feedback diminishes greatly with time. Your goal should be to grade and return every assignment at the next section meeting after it was due. All the due dates are on the course outline, so you can plan your schedule accordingly.
     
   • If you're a grader working with a TA, make sure when you receive something to grade that you know—then and there—when it needs to be returned (remember that the TA will want to look over the papers before passing them back), and who will record the scores. If you aren't sure you'll be able to get things graded in time, don't just take the papers and say, "I'll try, but no guarantees." You should be able to tell long in advance, by looking at the course outline, when the heavy grading periods will be, so you can plan your own schedule accordingly. But, if something comes up so that you won't be able to grade things in time, let your TA know immediately, so there's still time to have someone else do the grading.
     
   • If there were any particularly good or particularly bad assignments, or anything else unusual that you think the instructor or TA should see and consider, don't hesitate to point them out.
     
   • Keep good (backed-up) records. Be sure you have both paper and electronic copies of all your grades; losing recorded grades is an unconscionable disaster. Even if someone else will record your scores officially, it's a good idea for you to have a list of names and user IDs against which you can mark the scores (like a rollbook); this will act as another backup, just in case things get lost.
     
   • If a student has a question or complaint about a score, don't treat it as an adversary situation:
     
     • Don't be forced into making a snap decision on the spot. If you can't tell immediately that you made a mistake, ask to take the paper back and review it, when nobody's breathing down your neck.
       
     • Don't get into protracted arguments. Once you've given your reasons, if the student keeps hammering at you, say calmly but clearly something like, "I'm sorry, but that's how I graded everyone's paper. You know how to answer this kind of question in the future," and then turn to someone else.
       
     • If you find you made a mistake or overlooked something, change the score swiftly and gracefully. There's no shame in making the mistake, only in refusing to correct it.
       
   • Be professional. A TA should not arbitrarily overrule a grader's grading decisions (nor should an instructor arbitrarily overrule a TA's); for anything more involved than a simple addition error, instructors or TAs should consult with the actual grader before making any change, since only he or she knows the exact details of the grading criteria. This is a matter of professional courtesy and respect for the grader's independent judgement. Likewise, nobody on the instructional staff should second-guess or criticize other staff members to the students. Students' confidence in the course and the grading process breaks down when they see that the instructional staff can't agree among themselves. If a student expresses to you a problem or concern with the course or anyone involved with it, you should pass that concern along, keeping the student's name to yourself if you think that's necessary or appropriate.
     
   • Be conscious of security. Circle answers, or make lines through blank spaces, so nobody will be tempted to add correct answers after the things are passed back. (Do this as an automatic, unfailing habit.) Also, don't leave answer keys or assignments lying around unattended—this especially means you must stand by the printer as they come out, so nobody picks it up by mistake.
     
   • Be conscious of privacy. Do not let students see their classmates' scores, Email addresses, or student ID numbers, all of which are private information. If you post or distribute a list of grades, use the last four digits of the students' IDs, sorted numerically; that's random.
   
   
9. Grading lab assignments
   
   • Students will submit the machine-readable part of their assignments to Checkmate.
     
   • We have forms that lay out criteria for grading programs: correctness, program style, commenting, and so on. There's a copy in the lab manual.
     
   • Maintain high standards for lab work. If you automatically give every student 90% of the points unless there's a serious problem, all your scores will be clustered at the high end of the scale and it will be hard to make distinctions at grading time. Try to have your section's average score closer to 70% than to 90%; call their attention to their imperfections by deducting points, and they'll do better next time. Check with the instructor or your more experienced colleagues for help with this.
     
   • Pay attention to good programming style. You don't do students any favor by letting them get away with bad indentation, no modularity, literal constants, and so on; deduct points and they'll get the point. Style guidelines appear in the lab manual; you may modify or add to them if necessary, but be sure to tell your students of these changes far enough in advance that they can apply the revisions in their assignments.
     
     
10. Scheme tips
    
    • What is Scheme? A simple dialect of Lisp, used in introductory courses in many good schools.
      
    • Why do Scheme?
      
      • Because no computer scientist can live out a career knowing only one approach to programming, and the sooner one is exposed to a variety of approaches (like the functional approach in the case of Scheme, in addition to the object-oriented approach of Java), the less likely one is to become a language bigot.
        
      • Because a language like Scheme can be the best tool to solve some problems (e.g., building rapid prototypes or using very long integers). A major theme of ICS 22 is building up the student's repertoire of tools and approaches to problems; Scheme is one such tool everyone should have.
        
      • Because Scheme is more powerful than Java, in the sense that it does more work for you. For example, we distribute a Scheme solution to the bus stop queue simulation (Lab 2) that's just two pages long, half of which is comments.
        
    • You can run Scheme on your machine at home; www.plt-scheme.org has a free Scheme environment for all major platforms. This is the same environment we run in the labs.
      
    • Some reasonable on-line resources for Scheme are accessible through the course web page; they're longer than students will need for ICS 22, but they're shorter than any printed materials available.
      
      
11. Electronic Resources
    
    • Encourage your students to send course-related questions to the mail alias ics22@uci.edu; these go to the instructors and all the TAs for the course, so whoever sees the question first can respond (with a cc: back to the alias so the rest of the staff knows it's been answered), giving the student rapid feedback. Students really appreciate this rapid turnaround, and it's much less intrusive on the teaching staff than scheduling four extra office hours. We expect all TAs to answer their fair share of questions to these aliases. (For more involved programming assignments, individual TAs may have slightly different grading requirements, so be careful to qualify your responses (e.g., "in my section ...") in such a case. On the other hand, for some assignments we may designate a specific person to handle all questions about the specs; this will guarantee consistency across sections.)
      
    • To send messages to your students, use the mailing list we will set up through EEE. Use this list rather than one you build yourself; the registrar automatically updates it as students add and drop your section, and EEE maintains a web-based archive of all the messages.
      
    • To get a current roster for your section, follow the link from EEE.
      
    • EEE also provides a way of posting students' scores securely; we will talk more about this as the quarter goes on.