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Comment by dougtygar | Hacker News Reader

Hi, this is Doug Tygar here -- I'm in the instructor of the course in question. I appreciate all the comments -- but for various reasons, this course had a breakdown in finding TAs: so we have 170 students and only space for about 60-90 students. I'm sorry to say that the same problem is occurring in a number of other upper division (e.g., junior-senior) level classes this semester in computer science at Berkeley -- although for various reasons, CS 161 is taking it on the nose.

I really wish we had sufficient resources to teach the class properly.

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At my university (Caltech), professors are not allowed to give proctored exams. Most quizzes, midterms, and finals are take-home. I'm curious why you think such strict oversight is needed when it's possible for things to work with no oversight at all? Wouldn't that be easier for you and the few TAs you have available?

Hi xvedejas -- I so wish we had adequate resources so we could consider better formats for the course. I completely agree with you that this is not the optimal format.

Why not just arrange to pay the missing TAs out of your own pocket or a research grant? I'm sure you make enough money. If the issue is not financial but an inability to find other qualified TAs, then double the hours of the ones you already have and it will work out. Offer them 1.5x or 2x pay if they say they are too busy.

Asking students to drop the class just ends up making those who choose to stay in the class feel guilty. And employing draconian measures to encourage people to drop out in order to meet administrative needs is passive aggression, plain and simple. Your beef is with admin, not with students, so don't take it out on them, don't involve them in it, and don't use them as pawns.

Worst case, sacrifice research and do all the TA work yourself. You can use this as a bargaining chip with admin next semester.

Foobar -- thanks for your suggestions. I've been trying to hire TAs for this course for two months. It is not a money issue.

Well if you have a lot of money available, maybe it's a money issue in that you aren't paying enough. As a thought experiment, what would happen if the TAs were paid $100,000 each? Would you attract more qualified candidates?

Good plumbers make a lot of money because it's a dirty and disgusting job that nobody wants to do.

Foobar -- that's a great question.

It turns out that the university has a lot of rules about how TAs (and how much) TAs are paid, and further TAs are unionized (they are members of the United Auto Workers -- believe it or not!) and that we are bound by contract restrictions.

Sounds like you are in a jam. As far as I understand it, given the current syllabus, either you have to lower your hiring standards or do the work yourself. I've done both of those things in the past, and it was always a pain. Ultimately I settled for reducing the amount of TA work that had to be done. A lot of grading is probably optional, you might not be required to have a midterm and final, stuff like that. Rather than let yourself be victimized here, try to be creative with the resources that you do have, you'll figure something out.

Foobar -- that's a great plan, and let me assure you there is a lot of activity going on in the background.

If you want to talk about this, and you're on the Berkeley campus, I sit in Soda Hall 739. Alternatively, I hike most evenings in Tilden Park for exercise -- if you'd like to join me sometime and talk about your ideas, I'd certainly welcome hearing them.

Oh, I'm not in your class or even at Berkeley. I'm just discussing things on an internet forum. Good luck though, because from the comments here it sounds like your students are pretty angry, and admin is being unhelpful.

Thanks for the kind wishes!

This is quite a disingenuous explanation for the syllabus. Several of the aspects contained in the syllabus have nothing to do with a GSI shortage -- in fact, one of them (the daily quizzes adds work for the GSIs to deal with.

There's no reason to punish the undergraduate students for the failings of the department. Things like denying bathroom breaks don't do anything to help out your resource shortage, unless you're basically saying that the only way to have enough resources is to make the class so unpleasant that no one wants to take it. Still, this is completely unfair to those students that actually end up taking the class. If that is the case, I can at least understand it -- however, you should explicitly say so

If you've taken a particularly extreme approach to "wake the department up," you should just come out and say so, rather than claiming that this policy is the only way to deal with it.

A somewhat related thought:

I'm not sure what the reason for the lack of TAs is, but I do know that some of the security professors are spending their time on things other than Berkeley activities (i.e. startups, etc.). I have no idea if you're involved with this yourself, but perhaps you guys need to figure out how to get your faculty to be able to support more graduate students rather than spending your time coming up with an abusive policy.

Hi anonucbstudent -- actually my plan is to personally grade all the quizzes, so that is a burden on me -- not on them.

I completely agree with you that the undergrad students are not at all at fault here. You pay a lot of tuition and deserve better.

What prevents TA's from teaching more than 1 or 2 discussion sections? If each of them taught 2~3 discussions, wouldn't everyone be happier? As students, it would be nice to know how the TA hours are managed. TA's earn a lot of money for teaching. Does a 20-hr TA do 2 hours of discussion, 1 hour of office hour, 1 hour of discussion prep, 1 hour of making homework, etc? How does it add up to 20 hours? Do they have to redesign the entire class and grade homework problems? If necessary, can they take one more hour of discussion from one of the other responsibilities? It would be great if the teaching staff is clearer and more open about this.

Another_anon -- that's a great question, but I cannot answer personnel questions in a public forum -- if you want to drop by 739 Soda, I'll be happy to try to answer your question.

Our course has what Berkeley EECS calls "30 hours of TAs." I can assure you that they'll end up doing a lot more than 30 hours worth of work each week.

I'll also remind you that our teaching assistants are unionized, and we are bound by contract rules.

But even if I had the power to change that (and I do not), you can see that it would have to change for every single EECS class -- why would a TA want to teach 4 discussion sections for CS 161 when s/he could get the same pay credit teaching 2 discussions sections for another CS class?

I don't know how much I can say, but 1 section of any class is 10 hours of TA paid time. Period. Doesn't matter if you work less or more.

Though, often times, most TA's I know put in far more than their required time.

Can you explain how being completely intolerant of the fact that students have lives helps with your resource constraints? People will be a couple minutes late. Things happen. I don't think it's reasonable to threaten kicking someone out of the class and failing them for being late once.

Again, if you want to say that you need to make the class as terrible as possible so that people drop, then just say so.

anon, sorry I was not completely clear:

I hate to make this request, but I need half to 2/3rds of the students to drop the course. I'm hoping that you will still be able to learn a lot from the class -- but I need to find a mechanism to make the class smaller. Being strict on attendance seemed like the "least bad" of several rather unattractive alternatives.

I'm hoping that someone has a better idea, and I'm completely open. Please come and see me in 739 Soda.

Far far better idea: cancel all existing registrations and reopen it at 10am next Wednesday. If the system doesn't support that, then say you will be "reregistering" people by hand and the first x to be at your office at 10am Wednesday are in. Doesn't fuck over an entire semester for people. Was really easy to come up with. If you really wanted good ideas you could have asked the class in the first session or on your blog and surely someone would have had a better idea than your horrific plan to make everyone hate you and the class.

Jacalata -- I did look into dis-enrolling students, and was told it was a non-starter.

And I have to say that it is already a huge problem at Berkeley to simply get enrolled into a CS class. There are simply not enough resources to go around. That's why this class has a huge waitlist.

By the way, this problem is also occurring in other classes, but they are scheduled as Monday-Wednesday classes. My class is Tuesday-Thursday -- the first day of classes at Berkeley was 8/29. Monday is Labor Day holiday at Berkeley, so those other classes will have to deal with their situations on 9/4. (However, their TA deficits are not quite as large as those that we have in CS 161).

Doug, don't you feel that you could have told us about this before the first day of classes? Nobody blames you for the budget problems, or for the shortage of TAs. But you're just another person in the long chain of people who have made horrible administrative decisions, culminating in this terrible situation. And on top of that, you certainly came off as extremely cold and unconcerned, both in class and when I spoke to you in person regarding the matter. Trying to look understanding when you are on a public forum doesn't change a thing, and I highly doubt that you can do much to save face at this point -- you've really gone out of your way here to make yourself a villain to the undergraduate community. And there is simply no excuse for waiting until the first day of class to inform us of these circumstances.

Hi Angry -- Sorry that I came off as cold. At this point, though, I really do need half or two-thirds of the students to drop this course.

You raise an excellent question about why no notification went out before. Indeed, for the last two months I've been asking the department to change its policies so we can get some more TAs in class. These efforts were still going on Wednesday evening -- the night before the first class (and indeed, they are still going on this morning!)

I also tried to stop the process of allowing so many students to register for the course when we didn't have TA support.

If you'd like to talk about this more, please come see me.

It seems like, for various reasons, you want to make a very public statement.

John, that syllabus was only intended for internal Berkeley use only -- I posted it on the class blog without any thought that it would be picked up by Ycombinator. (Although, once it appeared, I did link to the topic from the class blog and encouraged the class to chime in: http://cs161.blogspot.com/2013/08/trending-on-ycombinator.ht... )

In case it is not 100% obvious, I'm quite unhappy with the situation (having a TA shortage, and having to run the class this way).

Having said all of this, happy to see a healthy discussion in Ycombinator. I'm a big supporter of free speech, and I think there are a lot of interesting comments here. So more power to you.

why are TA's so hard to come by this semester? is it due to the size of the 61 series?

Josh, thanks for your input.

I'm afraid that it's a bit hard to answer your question in a public forum. If any Ycombinator readers are on the Berkeley campus and want to chat with me, I'm at 739 Soda Hall.

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