CSE 95: Tutor Training

Wednesdays 12:00pm - 12:50pm & 1:00pm - 1:50pm CSE 2154

Welcome to CSE 95: Tutor Training. This course is intended to help you become a more effective CSE tutor. We hope it will also offer you skills that you will find valuable in your professional career in the future. This website will provide you with all of the information you need in CSE 95.

Resources

Staff

Instructor

Joe Politz (jpolitz@eng.ucsd.edu)

Office: CSE 3206

Tutors

Cheery Wang (qiw131@ucsd.edu)

Catherine Xia (f3xia@ucsd.edu)

Allston Fojas (amfojas@ucsd.edu)

Schedule

Syllabus

This course is part of the requirement for all new CSE tutors to complete their training. You will receive 2 credit hours that may count towards lower division CSE electives.

In CSE 95, you will learn and practice skills related to assisting with CSE courses as a tutor. This includes student-facing tasks like presenting content, helping in office hours, and creating tutorials or assignment writeups, as well as behind-the-scenes activities like grading and academic integrity processes.

For CSE 95, you will be expected to:

  • Attend CSE 95 class sections and participate in in-class discussions and activities.
  • Attend the lectures of the course you are tutoring for, along with its staff meeting.
  • Complete an out-of-class activity related to the course you’re tutoring each week.

In addition, we will be relying on your on-the-ground experience as a tutor this quarter. As part of the CSE 95 class, you need to

  • Attend class each week
  • Actively participate in class and out-of-class work

What You Will Learn

CSE 95 will help you with the basic communication skills, grading skills, and professionalism needed to be an effective CSE tutor. Some of the topics we will address in this course include

  • How to clearly explain technical materials and help students effectively
  • How to use course resources and how to identify academic integrity problems
  • What are professional and unprofessional behaviors
  • Other issues (time management, consistent grading in homework and exams, university policies)
  • And we will share our tutoring experience to make everyone better

How you will be graded

This course will be graded as pass / not pass. Here are the two components that you will be graded on:

  1. Weekly Assignments

    We expect you to read the assigned materials carefully and complete your assignments on time. Most of the assignments require you to post responses to specific questions in a Google Form. Unless otherwise announced, all assignments are due before 10pm on Tuesday evening. Your responses are graded with the following scale:

    2: thoughtful and complete. 1: cursory or incomplete work 0: no work was submitted on time

    You can miss one assignment; if you miss more, you cannot pass CSE95.

  2. Participation

    There are two components to the participation category which you will be graded on:

    1. Each week’s in-class participation will be graded based on the following scale

      • 2: on time and participated in class
      • 1: late for class
      • 0: absent

      If you miss more than 2 points in in-class participation (i.e. miss more than one class or be late for more than 2 classes), you cannot pass CSE95. Failure of CSE 95 may put your employment in jeopardy.

    2. Attending lectures for the class that you tutor for.

      • You should attend all the lectures that you tutor for this entire quarter and attention to what is covered in class and help with various tasks during lectures.
      • We will designate record keepers for each CSE course that has hired new tutors. The record keeper will keep track of lecture attendance of new tutors and the instructor of the course will sign off the attendance sheet on a weekly basis.
      • Record any and all special occasions for the attendance (i.e. put “N/A” if there is no staff meeting/lecture that week, put “Midterm” if the lecture was in-class exam), and highlight the cells for which the tutors are absent for.

    3. Attendance FAQs:

      • What if I am sick? A: Stay home and get better. Write “sick” instead of signing your name
      • What if I have to miss class for some other reason? A: You must get permission from your instructor in advance. You must substitute this missed work with some other work (for credit, not pay)
      • What if a class/staff meeting is cancelled? A: Write “cancelled”. You do not need to make up this hour.

    If you miss more than 10% of the lectures that you should attend, you cannot pass CSE95.

Diversity and Inclusion

We are committed to fostering a learning environment for this course that supports a diversity of thoughts, perspectives and experiences, and respects your identities (including race, ethnicity, heritage, gender, sex, class, sexuality, religion, ability, age, educational background, etc.). Our goal is to create a diverse and inclusive learning environment where all students feel comfortable and can thrive.

Our instructional staff will make a concerted effort to be welcoming and inclusive to the wide diversity of students in this course. If there is a way we can make you feel more included please let one of the course staff know, either in person, via email/discussion board, or even in a note under the door. Our learning about diverse perspectives and identities is an ongoing process, and we welcome your perspectives and input.

We also expect that you, as a student in this course, will honor and respect your classmates, abiding by the UCSD Principles of Community (https://ucsd.edu/about/principles.html). Please understand that others’ backgrounds, perspectives and experiences may be different than your own, and help us to build an environment where everyone is respected and feels comfortable.

If you experience any sort of harassment or discrimination, please contact the instructor as soon as possible. If you prefer to speak with someone outside of the course, please contact the Office of Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination: https://ophd.ucsd.edu/.

Academic Integrity

In this course we expect students to adhere to the UC San Diego Integrity of Scholarship Policy. This means that you will complete your work honestly, with integrity, and support and environment of integrity within the class for which you are tutoring. Some examples of specific ways this policy applies to CSE 95 include:

  • Honesty about attendance (including punctuality, and illness) in class
  • Completion of pre-class assignments individually and on-time
  • Encouraging honest work among the students in the class for which you are tutoring
  • Reporting suspected instances of academic dishonesty in this class, as well as in the class you are tutoring, to the instructor right away.

Other Policies

Illness/Emergencies

As we described above, we expect you to attend all CSE 95 class sessions, class sessions for the course you are tutoring. However, we understand the illness and emergencies happen. If you are too ill to attend class or a true emergency arises, you should let the instructor know ASAP, and you should not attend. Your instructor might ask you to provide a doctor’s note, but we will not do so in CSE 95. If your illness becomes excessive, we will deal with that when and if it happens.

We also expect you to complete all assignments on time. Because these assignments are so short (1 hour outside of class, on average), you should be able to complete them even if you are sick at some point during the week, by managing your time appropriately.

Technology Policy

Technology use in CSE 95, and in the course you are tutoring, should be limited to activities explicitly authorized by the instructor in direct support of your duties in the course. This means you should keep all devices away unless you have been specifically instructed to use them, and then use them only for the assigned activities.

Students with Disabilities

Students requesting accommodations for this course due to a disability must provide a current Authorization for Accommodation (AFA) letter issued by the Office for Students with Disabilities (OSD) which is located in University Center 202 behind Center Hall. Students are required to present their AFA letters to Faculty (please make arrangements to contact me privately) and to the OSD Liaison in the department in advance so that accommodations may be arranged.