Reader guide

While the Reader is the intended audience here, others are welcome to read it.

General info

• Responsibilities section of the job post

• Schedule

• In grading/Discussions:

  • We want to try giving students just enough hints to figure it out without giving them the answer.

    • If they seem totally lost, direct them to office hours.

  • Don’t spend a ton of time trying to figure out something that you don’t understand; feel free to escalate to the instructor.

• For students seeking one-on-one help, direct them to office hours.

  • If someone asks to meet with you specifically, you’re welcome to do so, but not required.

• Notifications:

  • You may want to tweak your Ed Discussion notification settings.

  • You will want to turn on notifications for assignment comments.

• Keep an eye out for students who I should encourage to apply as a Reader next term. Things to look for:

  • Being consistently helpful in the Discussions

  • Clean, well-documented solutions for the homeworks

  • Asking good questions

Weekly cadence

Weeks end the day of class, the next one starts the day after. “Weeks” is therefore referring to the class-to-class cycle. These “weeks” may be longer than seven days if there’s no lecture due to a holiday.

• Attending class

• Recording attendance based on the sign-in sheets

• Grading assignment submissions and releasing grades for your section

  • Recommend waiting until the submission deadline to start grading, to avoid issues with students who may have been intending to continue working on it

Between-class participation tracking

… for students in your section. Helper notebook.

• There are five weeks of participation tracked, from Lecture 0 through Lecture 5.

  • That last week, they should be focused on their Final Project.

• We can be fairly forgiving/generous with what counts as completion.

• Every student should have each week marked one way or the other.

• The instructor will mark participation for students that came to office hours.

• Each week is represented as an Assignment.

  • Easiest to do this through the Grades interface, rather than SpeedGrader

  • Every cell for previous weeks should be filled in

  • Mark each student that participated as Complete

  • Mark those who didn’t as Incomplete

• Instructor can export enrollment activity for you.

  • We start tracking participation for a student’s first full week in the class. Participation for prior weeks should be marked as Excused.

Discussions

• Help page

• We are trying to strike a balance between students getting accurate answers quickly and encouraging students to help one another to cement their learning

• Ensure Discussion questions have answers within the specified timeline.

  • On-call schedule: TBD

  • Wait 24 hours to respond to questions that could be answered by another student, giving them a chance to do so.

    • Make sure homework questions have an answer within 48 hours, since they are time-sensitive.

    • Within 24 hours of when homework is due, answer questions as soon as possible to get students unstuck.

• Please give corrections/clarifications on student answers where necessary.

• If posts have the wrong Category, are a Question when they should be a Post or vice versa, please fix.

• Mark correct answers as Accepted, if they aren’t already

Check-in meeting

• How’s the workload?

• Anything you need clarification on?

• Any Discussions the instructor should jump in on?

• What came up in Discussions/assignments (common problems, etc.) that might be useful to cover in class?

• Are all cells in the gradebook filled in (through last week)?

Assignments

• Recommend creating a GMail filter for something like from:google.com subject:"shared with you" ("colab notebooks" OR homework) to Skip Inbox so that you aren’t notified every time a student shares a notebook with you

• Grading is done through SpeedGrader

  • Filter the students to your particular section in the top right

  • You can leave comments on particular cells through the Colab interface

  • If points are deducted, explicitly state what the deductions are for

• Scoring rules

• How to give extensions

  • Grant any request for 1-2 days made before the deadline; escalate others to the instructor

  • Set the Until date to the original late submission deadline or the new due date, whichever is later

• Solutions folder will be shared with you from Google Drive

  • The students don’t need to match the provided solution exactly, as long as they do what the question is asking

Grading

How to grade in CourseWorks

You are checking student submissions against the solutions. That said, student code/output doesn’t need to look exactly like what’s in the solution, as long as they’re doing what’s asked for in each Step. When grading, points should only be deducted based on these criteria. Please leave comments for:

• Point deductions, explaining what it’s being deducted for

• Feedback like “this could be done better/differently,” even if there isn’t a corresponding point deduction

Checks

The following should be true for each Assignment:

• The description is a link to the assignment page on this site

• Points

  • 100 points per Assignment, except for Homework 3 and the Final Project Proposal which are 50 each

  • Percentage of the overall grade matches the breakdown in the syllabus

• Grouped and ordered in a logical way

• Display Grade as: Percentage

• Submission Type: Online, Website URL

• Dates match the schedule:

  • Due date

  • Until date

• Published

• Grading Policy Settings (under Grades tab)

  • Late Policies: Check “Automatically apply deduction to late assignments”

  • Grade Posting Policies: Automatic

Plagiarism

Per the Code of Academic and Professional Conduct:

It is the responsibility of all members of the SIPA community to encourage academic integrity and to deter, confront, and report all acts of academic dishonesty.

See the class policies for more details for what constitues plagiarsm vs. fair reuse.

It isn’t your responsibility to look for potential instances of cheating/plagiarism. That said, if you have suspicions of those occuring, you must report them to the instructor. Things you might notice:

• Use of a package we haven’t covered in class

• Using a technique we didn’t cover in class

• Multiple student submisions:

  • Being identical

  • Solving a problem in the same unusual way

Final Project

Proposals

• Students are encouraged to submit before the deadline to get feedback sooner.

  • Please provide feedback on the proposals within four days of submission so that students can get started.

• If the proposal shows effort and follows the format, full credit should be given.

• Things to look for (don’t spend too long on these):

  • Will their dataset answer their question?

  • Do they have a question that is objectively answerable?

  • Will it be the right level of challenge for the duration of the project and their skills, not too much, not too little?

• You will often need to provide feedback along the lines of:

  Your question is good, but you’ll probably be able to answer it in relatively few lines of code. Think about what your follow-up question(s) will be.

• Constructive feedback can be given as a reply in Ed (where other students can see). If the proposal is bad, send an email.

  • In other words, avoid embarrassing anyone.

• To indicate to a student that their proposal is good to go, mark the reply as Resolved.

Grading

The Final Projects themselves are peer graded. Once the peer review deadline passes:

1. In the Final Project Assignment, open Speedgrader.

2. Open each submission.

3. Calculate the median of the scores from the peers, using that as the final grade.

4. In the Gradebook, give points to the reviewer under the Final Project Peer Review.

Scoring details.