TA Sudoku successful

[dvandom]

Every TA has a job, and every job has a TA. Mind you, I didn't get out of the building without having to make a change (someone finally told me they didn't need a grader at all, so I have someone to shift onto another task that was a little short on graders), but hopefully there won't be any major changes needed. Especially since classes in general start on Monday. Yes, two days from now.

You know how sometimes a road will get resurfaced, and be all nice and smooth and shiny...and THEN the utilities people come in and tear it up, leaving ugly patches? The TA scheduling can be like that, with students suddenly discovering conflicts they didn't tell me about and requiring me to tear chunks in the schedule to shift things around. Hopefully I won't have to do more than tweak the curbs this time around.

Comments

[jarodrussell.livejournal.com]

This may be a dumb question, but I'm curious since scheduling seems to be a prickly subject at colleges and even community colleges: is there not some kind of software for helping students and for building class schedules? From the way it's been described, all the variables make it pretty complex. I just wasn't sure if even higher-higher educators, like you, had ever heard of such things.

Sorry if this is off-topic.

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

Well, one thing to keep in mind is that I'm assigning teaching duties to graduate students who come in from all over the planet. The short answer is, there are some computer-assists, but there's way too many judgement calls at every step of the process for anything but a human or an expert system of some (possibly nonexistent yet) kind.

There's a lot of human-decision-making that needs to go into figuring out what their own courses will be...evaluation of speaking and comprehension skills, evaluation of their physics background, etc. This can't be done by machine, and can't be done until the students are physically present...and all the evaluators are (the guy who handles our physics course placement is usually gone at conferences the first couple weeks of August). Now, most of our international students show up in July and start taking courses in English, being evaluated again at the end of those courses...but this time out the lightning slowed the scoring of those evals. An additional complication that sometimes shows up is that advisors are often waiting to hear whether a grant is approved...if it is, they want their advisees on research money, not teaching. But when I do spring scheduling, a lot of grants don't come in yea or nay until the end of the calendar year.

So, you have several evaluations: Will the student be supported as a teacher or a research assistant? How good is their English (determining not only whether they're allowed in the classroom, but also some of their course schedule if they need ESL)? How good is their physics (course schedule)? Is the student a good match for a course personality-wise (something I have to make the call on)? Is this particular set of assignments for the student unreasonable (i.e. 6 straight hours of teaching is not a good idea). Some of these could be programmed, but not enough to make things run significantly smoother.

Once I have all these judgements in place, there is one thing I could do to automate it, and that would be get a scheduling program to spit out matches once I give it all the parameters and restrictions. But it only takes me about an hour to do it by hand once all the prep is done, so it's not really worth the resources.

Now, for undergrads, we do have an online registration system that supposedly has various safeguards to prevent students from accidentally setting up conflicts for themselves or from forgetting to take all the parts of a course (lecture, lab, recitation, for instance). But it still doesn't have an automatic waitlist (I have to manually let people into sections when spaces open up), and every semester at least one student manages to accidentally sign up for a lab section at the Salina campus (just got an email from one such student today). My undergrad TAs are generally not a hassle, because they're already around, are native speakers of English, and get their course schedules worked out months in advance. :)