Response to: https://www.reddit.com/r/UIUC/comments/1nquuj9/unprofessional_behavior_from_cs_professors_and_tas/

I am one of the Lead TA’s of CS425, and might be guilty of the said `unprofessional’ behavior.  A friend pointed me to this. I am glad you made the post - it is a good opportunity to discuss what can’t be discussed elsewhere, to convey the course philosophy and get frank feedback.

For those who don’t know, CS425 teaches “Distributed Systems” (fundamental algorithms and frameworks that run behind modern digital infrastructure to ensure they are always RUNNING, CORRECT and COST EFFICIENT).  It is one of the largest non-essential courses in CS (>500 students).  We have 2 instructors, 10 TAs.

Speaking only for myself, it is my first time TA-ing this course (so experienced TAs and students here, please pardon the naivety if any), but here is the reasoning behind how I conduct it. As lead TA, I am responsible for setting the policy, tone and logistics of the course along with the instructors. I am very opinionated about some of these- especially helping the ‘interested’ vs the ‘forced’ (students forced to take course due to resume, GPA etc). It would be great to discuss it out! If you have better solutions/ideas, please shoot.

Because large amount of TA time goes into grading and often leads to student complaints, I will focus on that, and the tone/messaging in the course. Running a course involves problems of resource allocation, ethics/fairness, exception handling etc. OP's experience (without knowing the specifics) may be a side effect of some the choices we made here:

  1. Resource allocation:
    1. The key question is: How much to spend on educative part vs non-educative part. Alternatively, how much to spend on truly interested students vs those who are here to mainly optimize for grades. It is a tradeoff we face often and I heavily lean to the side of helping the former. To keep the non-educative part of the course streamlined (e.g: Grading) without compromising the difficulty of the course, we have lot of rules around submissions, apply penalties for not following submission instructions etc. Intention is to use that time for improving the course (e.g: More informative piazza post etc). Penalties are a lever we use to streamline. This is often a leading cause of student discontent, may appear harsh/petty and as us being ‘lazy’ about grading.
    2. A recent example: About 10% of class (50 students) had a problem that created 3X more TA work (failing to tag HW pages on gradescope) i.e extra workload worth of 150 students (~1/4 of class). Now, should you give those students a blanket penalty and save TA time or you should you sit fixing the grading pipeline because these few students missed the submission instructions. My suggestion was “Let us NOT allow regrades for those not following instructions. That’s how the real world is. Why are we pampering students?”. One could claim - like some comments here - that this is a dereliction of duty because as TAs our main job is to grade and help students and we are avoiding it (because say “TAs/Instructors like research more than teaching.”).
    3. To prevent such appearances and student complaints we often end up with unproductive use of TA time imo. So, I try to openly discourage point-hunting and ask students not to whine for grades on the basis of technicalities alone. Such students are indeed a burden to us and other students. You made a mistake? Take the penalty and move on.
    4. We would like to reallocate the time to having additional TA hours to discuss System Design decisions (that is the juice of a course like CS425, and what’s actually useful in interviews, jobs etc). We would like to bring in industry speakers (instructor has done this in the past when class sizes were smaller) etc. But today instructors have to shoot down such ideas because TAs have to tend to students who IMO are lackadaisical. And it annoys me to no end and I do express it so, with an intention, in Piazza/email replies.
    5. Now, we can make all this much easier by templatizing the course (e.g: MCQ for HWs and exams etc) like many large classes do here. But instructors deeply believe in retaining the malleable nature of assignments to promote creativity. It is a course in design thinking after all.
  2. Fairness problem: Grading is also a hard fairness problem often. Easy way out is to be very lenient - approve all regrades, apply no penalties. Easy for TAs, happy students. But of course, it is grossly unjust. So we think a lot about being fair and want to spend time on it.
    1. E.g: How to ensure no student is penalized just because they `thought differently’ about a HW question than us? How to distinguish such student solution from someone who just throws a wall of text and later argues the answer is exists somewhere in there? We do spend a lot of time discussing such individual case to ensure student sincerely attempted something new is not unfairly penalized. We discuss it case by case inspite of the large class size to ensure fairness. And we are curt to students who we feel are trying to game the system.
  3. Tone:
    1. I usually tone-match the student. If you speak with entitlement (e.g: “Hey, all the answer is in there. Yes, I didn’t format it well, but my answer is correct”), you will get a similar reply. I try not to use disingenuous Thank you’s and Sorry’s. Being professional does not mean sounding nice. We encourage students to debate out their opinions on policies etc on Piazza rather than on emails/private posts. If you think you are correct, defend it out in the open. TL;DR: If you are arguing for grades and grades alone, we do not think you are entitled to our time.
    2. We NEVER belittle a student question. We take OH seriously. Often in office hours, the TAs note down questions, have slack discussions among ourselves and email individual students the correct responses later. But if some TA did not hold up to this standard, or was condescending on course’s conceptual content, very sorry and please do let know. We will do better next time.
    3. About “smarter than everyone else they think they are”: Yes, I did playfully says this in a Piazza post (To quote: “if you can prove me wrong in anything distributed systems, I owe you a lunch. But I’m sure it will not come to that”). We want to encourage students to be brash in their thinking - especially in Distributed systems design where a lot is about ‘good taste’. I am unapologetically proud of my knowledge and every student coming out of CS425 should be (Note: it doesn’t mean being stubborn)

OP: An actionable feedback I gather from OP is about “poorly run office hours” - please do let know when and what went wrong. We have received no such feedback on any course forums thus far - except one missed OH by one TA earlier this month. So we are caught unaware. Sorry about that. We want to fix it. Also, if I misunderstood your concerns, please let know - I might have gone on my own tangent. Clearly I had a lot to vent out, so thank you again for the post :)

Now, most of us don’t have formal training in teaching and some of these choices may be contrary to best practices. Do let know if so. Also, purpose of the post isn't to say how great we are as course staff. Most of it is our duty. We just want you to know that we are good people, that we have a true intention of serving the course well and that we mostly all do love teaching (not grading, sorry. It's a necessary evil.)

Also, a key purpose of this post is to try debunk the broad generalization that most STEM profs/TAs are not interested in teaching just because a proportion of students had bad experiences (and unavoidably so in large classes). Hope the discussions will make CS425 and other courses better.

PS: I understand capitalizing has a bad reputation these days. But the instructor uses it often in normal communication for emphasis, and I do too because it doesn't break the flow of writing unlike having to bold, when you are not used to markdown-style writing.