Comment by sbuccini | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sbuccini | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised you launched at Cal given your world-view of incentive alignment. I was there right when the department got slammed. Clearly, it wasn't an ideal situation but there was a ton of innovation in the department to meet demand. Additionally, Cal makes it very clear that Profs are expected to teach, and many who teach lower division classes certainly make it their top priority when teaching (thinking of mainly of DeNero, Hug, Garcia, Fox but would also include Babak, Sahai, Vazarani in this group as well).

DeNero led a ton of software development to help 61A scale (fuzz testing projects, automated hints, autograding). Cal recognized that lot of people taking 61A were actually business or biology majors who wanted to know how to code for their own industries, so they added an entirely new major, complete with new courses and its own building, to relieve pressure on the CS department.

A now-standard company (Gradescope) was launched to help TAs grade faster, often returning graded midterms just a day later. Not to mention Piazza, which became standard in all CS classes within one or two semesters.

And not only that, but tons of tutoring resources were available for lower-division classes from other student groups like HKN/UPE (spoiler alert -- most of these tutors were current or former TAs so you got the same level of knowledge without the waits) and ASUC.

I'm sure a lot of people who've given blood, sweat, and tears to scale this program in a resource-dearth environment _because_ they love CS so much would be upset with your characterization of the department's stance.

Completely agree. CS departments deserve a ton of credit for having to adjust to insane levels of growth that are unlike any other department.

Also you're spot on about Cal. In fact, I too questioned whether or not it made sense for us to launch there at first, especially given that they have such a topnotch CS program with incredible resources. However when we spoke to 100s of students there before we launched, we quickly learned that the competitive environment still resulted in so many students slipping through the cracks. Moreover, we encourage Edlyft mentors to direct students to existing resources on campus as well. Edlyft should not be a replacement for these existing resources, but instead a supplemental option where students feel they can be a little more vulnerable.

Lastly, our characterization of the climate in schools comes directly from students' experiences and our own. Cal definitely has tons of resources that I only wished I had access to when I was in school. However many schools are still very far from getting there, leading to so much talent being overlooked. Edlyft should not have to exist and we're successful when it no longer needs to.

I think that the main reason that students want tutors and other resources is because office hours are slammed during projects, event though there are lots of TA's and readers. There are a lot of resources to help students with material in terms of understanding, but there are a lot fewer to help students debug projects, so I think that it's where a lot of the demand is. Unfortunately, I don't see Denero or Hilfinger allowing private debugging help for hire as a solution due to cheating and plagiarism risks. How do you ensure that the tutors are abiding within the honor code, and not helping students cheat?

Wow! You highlighted exactly what we've heard from sooo many students: OH being slammed during projects as a major pain point.

To avoid helping students cheat, we have all Edlyft mentors agree to an academic honesty policy, go through mentor training, and all are interviewed before they join Edlyft. We've also considered recording sessions as well, but haven't gone that route yet.

But more than that it's been fascinating to watch some of our mentor sessions. What we've seen happen is some students actually prefer to use Edlyft to become an "excellent" CS student and hone their understanding of concepts vs. getting hw done just for the grade. My hypothesis on this is that our mentor sessions are unlike traditional office hours where you may only get 10min of TA attention. So, when students are able to slow down and really grasp concepts, doing hw on their own gets easier.

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