Onboarding guide for new teaching assistants
- Getting Started
- Clocking Hours
- What can be clocked
- When can I clock hours?
- Forgetting to Submit your Timesheet
- Working well with students
- Extensions
- Grading
- Plagirism and Moss
- Help Rooms
- Office Hours
- Discord
- Classes
- Course Evaluations
- Student Confidentiality
- News Posts
So you've been hired as a CS/CEG Teaching Assistant (TA). Congratuations 🥳. You can treat this repository as a general guide to being a TA. You'll meet many of many great people and students in the department. It's a great networking and learning opportunity.
- To clock hours, first go to Wings Express You should have a new employee tab here.
- From here, select the timesheet tab. If you have multiple positions at the university, here is where you can select which timesheet to bill your hours for which job. This includes work-study positions. If this is your only position (and you haven't changed to/from a work-study) you will likely only have a single selection
- Hours can be clocked on this screen in 2-week period. It is recommended to fill
this out as you work. At the end of the 2-week period, you'll receive an email from payroll saying that
timesheets are due sometime soon. This is your cue to go to this page and hit the
Submit for Approvalbutton. After a few days, your timesheet approver will (hopefully) approve your hours and will be paid the following Thursday. DO NOT CLOCK MORE THAN 28 HOURS PER WEEK (56 per pay period). If you do so, your employment will be terminated, and you will have to be rehired to fix it.
Any job related work may be clocked in your timesheet. This includes, but is defintely not limited to:
- Meetings
- Grading
- Labs
- Office Hours
- Answering a bunch of angry student emails
- Writing guides in a repository for future TAs
Just make sure you don't work for free and that your timesheet accurately reflects the hours you worked. Having some tractability here is helpful, but not strictly necessary.
The department enforces a variety of policies in regards to when hours can and cannot be clocked. Most importantly, HOURS MUST NOW BE CLOCKED DAILY. You must, as part of your paid duties, fill out your time sheet daily with the in and out times you worked. For example, if on a Monday, you work from 8am-12pm then take a break and work from 1pm-5pm, you should have two entries on Monday showing 8am in 12 pm out, 1pm in and 5pm out. Waiting until the last day or filling out time sheets a week in advance will not work. The department monitors these time sheets closely.
Also, YOU CANNOT WORK OVERNIGHT HOURS. If you are a Lab assistant/leader/recitation assistant, you can work your lab times during the hours of M-F 8am-9pm. If you are a helproom/grader, you may work during Saturday-Friday. No hours for any position should be recorded after 9pm on any day of the week.
Additionally, if you have two jobs - you must be very aware not to overlap working hours on your time sheets or you will likely be meeting with Student Employment about how you worked 2 jobs at the same time.
Students may not clock may than 28 hours per week. TA positions are posted at 10-20 hours per week. If your specific job demands more than 28 per week (56 hours per pay period), please ensure your professor is aware of this
Student employees are not expected to work when the university is closed for holidays, winter break, inclement weather, or other closure reasons. Some exceptions may apply for duties essential by the university, or at the supervisor/professors discretion (i.e. remote help room during snow storm, etc). Due to this, on days when the university is closed, you may be unable to log hours. On days where no-classes are held or the university is open, your hours are still valid.
International students cannot work more than 20 hours a week - for all jobs.
We have all done this before. You got the timesheet email, but it just slips away sometimes. The first thing to do is to go the payroll department in 204 University Hall. They'll get you a paper timesheet to fill out instead. Check out this guide for more detailed instructions on filling these out. You will need a physical signature from your usual timesheet approver. If you are able to get your paper timesheet approved before the standard deadline (usually the following Monday at noon) you'll still be paid at the usual time. If not, it will go onto your next paycheck.
Working well with students is probably what you'll be doing most often as a TA. You were hired because somebody was confident that you were one of the best people for this job. The difficult part comes from clearly communicating that to students. A good TA is clear and approachable, while also being empathetic.
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Clarity: To be as clear as you can be when conveying a concept to a student, you will likely need multiple ways of explaing it. Having a handful of different, but linked ideas of a concept is something that comes with time, but will greatly benefit students unstanding of your explanation.
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Approachability: Students tend to get the most of labs if they are not afraid to ask the TA a "stupid" question. Being casual and approachable really helps students feel comfortable and facilitates a better learning environment.
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Empathy: Stuff happens. Life is chaotic and people's lives are unpredictable. You should account for this in all things and if students ask for a deadline extension for a valid reason, make reasonable accomadations. Balancing empathy and being fair to everyone can be challenging.
If your course professor allows you to give extensions to students, it is important to communicate a few things to the students:
- Students do not need to share private information with us for an extension.
- Good reasoning for extension is preferred, but the details can be limited/omitted.
- Students are able to contact the professor if they do not feel comfortable sharing something with a TA .
Obviously, students will still often overshare, but relaying to them the above is still good practice.
How your class does grading is generally pretty class-dependent. If the students have some sort of Pilot Deliverable, it can be accessed through the course Pilot page's DropBox section. Pilot will let you do 4 things for each student
- Score it
- Give Feedback
- Save grade as draft
- Publish grade to student
The general advice here is to always give feedback telling students what they missed according to the assignment rubric. It is recommended to grade all assignments as a draft and then publish them all at once.
- From the home page of the class you're TAing for, go to dropbox.
- Then select what dropbox you're going to grade.
- Then select which student you're going to grade.
- Then input the points for the student and any feedback you have for them.
Everyone grades a little bit differently. A rubric is a starting place for ensuring consistency, but submissions are almost always more nuanced than a simple rubric can account for. If there is only a single grader, this is less of an issue, as the one grader will apply the same bias to each student, but gets harder when you have more graders. Generally, there are two approaches to solving this problem. It is heavily encouraged that at least one of these are followed to avoid grading bias in student grades.
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Central Authority: Audit all graders proposed scores through a central authority (often a lab leader) to ensure that all graders docked the same number of points for similar offenses.
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Rotation: Rotate which grader is responsible for grading which student submissions. For instance, if you had 2 grades and 50 students, Grader A would evaluate students 0-25 and Grader B would evaluate students 26-50. On the following week, have Grader A evaluate 26-50 and B evaluate 0-25.
These methods can and should be used in tandem with one another for more consistent student evaluation.
When it comes to programming assignments, it is important to ensure that students comply with university academic integrity standards The primary tool (other than general inspection) we use is a tool called MOSS: Measure of Software Similarity. For more information, check out this guide.
There are several help rooms in the department
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Programming and Discrete Math Help Room This is the effective CS help room. Many people chose to host their office hours here if is it not busy at their chosen time. It currently supports the following courses:
- CS 1180
- CS 1181
- CS 1160
- CS 2200
- MTH 2570
- CEG 2170
It is primarily focused on CS118X for the time being, as those are the TAs who are generally staffing it. For more information, check out the departments guide.
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Electrical Engineering Help Room
Undergraduate students taking EE courses can get help by visiting the EE help room. For more information, check out the departments guide.
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Dr. Taylor Informal Help Room
Dr. Taylor's help room is an informal option to point students to if they are having more general difficulties. Areas of help are:
- Understanding the importance of discrete mathematics in Computer Science & Engineering.
- How to improve comprehension.
- Basic math problem-solving and study skills.
- How to develop a computer code starting with a basic problem statement.
- Long and short-range options regarding the major of your degree.
If you are a lab leader, you are required to hold weekly office hours. This is time for students to get more personalized help and/or feedback regarding course-related materials. This is also the best time for students to ask confidential questions regarding their assignment grades, as a public setting like the help room can lead to confidentiality issues. You are required to hold a minimum of 2 office hours per week. This number can be increased based on need. But this only applies within reason (i.e. don't hold 10 extra hours one week because you just wanted more hours). There should be a dedicated space somewhere for you to hold these, but that can move if it is needed, see helproom.
The CECS department has a discord server. It acts as a central hub for informal communications about courses.
Every semester, you can select roles depending on what classes you are taking (or in this case teaching). Students can
use this to ask questions, where you can answer them in a public manner to benefit all students.
Due to the public nature of the Discord server, do not allow students to upload their assignment code. With the Teaching Assistant role, you
are granted the ability to delete their messages as needed.
Join the discord here.
If you are interested in a particular course's resources, check out classes/[your_class].md for a more detailed guide.
If the course guide does not exist yet, feel free to make the guide and submit a Pull Request.
At the end of every semester, students are asked to give course evaluations for their professors and Teaching Assistants. You will have to ask students to fill these out if you want real feedback. Historically, only about 5% of students will fill them out otherwise. These evaluations are made available to the professor only after final grades have been published. You can ask the course professor for your evaluation past this date if you are interested.
Wright State University is fully compliant with Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA). This mainly affects your job by specifying what information can’t be shared with anyone besides the appropriate faculty unless you have the student’s prior consent, including:
- Grades
- Academic Performance
- Assignment Details
There are many more things on this list, but those are the ones you are most likely to encounter as a TA. For more detailed information, please see the WSU FERPA Notice and University Policy 3010
To communicate effectively with students, it is often helpful to make anouncements as news posts on Pilot. Students will be notified of these posts if desired.
- Select the ▼ next to the "News" menu in the Pilot Home page
- Select "New News Item" from the dropdown
- Give you News post a title
- Write the body of your news post. Optionally, you may add file atachments to the body
- If you are finished, publish your News post, or save it as a draft to publish later
