If you’re a TA in Cosi105b you may be wondering what the duties and expectations are. I wrote this to help you understand not only the hard requirements, but also the softer aspects.
I am really counting on your proactive involvement to help me make this course work. We are all here for the students, yes trite but true. Our goal is that students feel that their hard work will pay off and be worthwhile for their time and efforts.
All of us will bend over backwards to help any student who wants to put in the work to be successful. We will be flexible and open minded about how this happens. We will reconsider any aspect of how the course is taught or graded if there is a reason to think it’s not effective.
You are our eyes, ears and voice with the students! I hope you take this to heart and do what it takes to make this class and thes students’ experience a great one. When and if you get to a point in the semester where you’re just not into it anymore or are collapsing under time pressure and are phoning it in – let us know and we will find another student to take your place with no hard feelings!
You should assume about 5-7 hours per week on average.
If you are confident in the material covered in class, you don’t need to come to the class lectures, other than the first class, to be introduced. This does not mean that you’re not allowed to come if you want. At least one of you is required at the Lab/Recitation meeting though.
You should understand the Academic Honesty standards and policies and be part of the early warning system if you feel that something is happening that is not right.
A few weeks into the semester I will appoint a lead TA. This is important so that I don’t become a bottleneck. Many decisions that normally would come to me will go to the lead TA.
There are two broad categories of responsibility:
Tracking and scoring homeworks. You all know that my courses have a fair bit of homework. A lot of it is participation-only (i.e. pass-fail). For those you need to give them a general look to decide if they get a 100 (a good effort) or 0 (otherwise.) Of course remember the 10 point deduction for non-pdf submissions or if the student’s name is not IN the pdf.
Proactively checking in on each of the teams to see whether they are progressing or stuck. During “lab/recitations” being proactive about helping students solve their technical problems. This means that you need to know the material at least as well as they do!
From time to time I will ask you to do a special assignment, like designing a new programming assignment or play testing an existing one.