Finding help a struggle as Comp Sci gains popularity

Some students in computer science classes find themselves spending upwards of 10 hours a week in the same room working on one assignment.

Many students come into entry-level computer science classes with different levels of programming experience. Office hours are a way to get feedback on the homework, which accounts for 50 percent of the overall grade.

There are 44 Computer and Information Science 110 teaching assistants for this semester alone, and each are responsible for holding two office hours a week. This amount of manpower devoted to this aspect of the class reflects the department's belief in the importance of these office hours in helping students learn how to code. CIS 110 offers office hours between five and nine hours per day, four days a week.

But that's still not enough to satisfy the demand for assistance.

Office hours are typically overcrowded, as class sizes increase each year. Although there are sometimes four TAs circulating the room, some students find themselves sitting in the online queue waiting for help for periods of up to an hour. College sophomore Julia Olson will spend four to five hours a day in the Moore 100 room working on CIS 120 homework assignments.

On the day an assignment is due, all the chairs in Moore 100 are full, and students are lined up sitting along the walls, waiting for their names to be called from the online queue, which can reach up to 30 people for the hardest assignments.  

Brown asserts that the overcrowding of these office hours is not atypical and that the department is “working on ways to improve the efficiency so that [they] can give quicker and better help to students.” 

Despite the difficult nature of the class and the many students who struggle to work through the homework assignments, College junior and CIS 110 TA Hunter Steitle supports the way the class is structured. “You have to put in the time to learn how to do it,” he said. “The only way to learn how to code is coding.”

Benedict Brown, a CIS 110 lecturer, strongly believes in the benefits of holding 30 office hours a week in both Moore 100 and Ware College House.

“By having these hours, we can have a more fast-paced class than if we expected students not to have that kind of availability,” Brown said. “It compensates for the diversity in backgrounds and allows students to learn more quickly.”

Brown compared the help that students get on their programing to “getting paragraph-level help on writing an essay” he said, which is important in a discipline where one minor typo can affect the entire assignment.

Steitle feels that students can get caught in a bad cycle if they rely on TAs too much.

“Programming is just like a foreign language, and I can see where people need instruction, but I don’t think people need to be there for hours,” Steitle said. “Students get caught in a trap of ‘I can’t do this,' and it becomes hard to catch up.”

Some classes, like Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics 347, use a lab format to achieve a similar goal of “assisting students with the ideas that they are trying to incorporate while facilitating independence,” Justin Thomas, a TA for MEAM 347, said. These engineering labs are required for students and are not necessarily centered around completing homework.

Other classes like CIS 160 allow students to work in groups on more math-based assignments. With this format, “it’s helpful to be able to bounce ideas off of people in the class,” Olson said.

Yet Brown feels that neither of these structures would work for computer science entry-level classes.

“Part of the learning process is getting stuck and having a little pain as you try and find the answer,” Brown said. “But finding this trivial error can make you learn and understand it more, and this can get lost working in pairs.”

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.