CS 301 -- GSI Practicum

Friday, October 14, 2005,  2:10pm-3:30pm, in 320 Soda Hall. 

Sharing your GSI experiences:
Mid-semester pressures, exam preparations, grading burden ...

Time Managment Hints:

• have an open discussion of what can possibly fit into a reasonable workload,
• make it clear that something needs to be dropped, delegated, or postponed,
• establish priorities among the various tasks on the to-do list.

• Reserve some time every day or every week to make some progress on your long-term projects.
• Reserve some time every  week to broaden your horizon: attend seminars, read intersting articles, surf the web ...
• Limit the time you devote to any one of your various responsibilities, or that you make available to do "chores."
  

Preparing Problem Sets and Exam Questions

1. Benjamin Mellblom and Varun Kacholia
2. Bobak Mortazavi and Leonard Wei
3. Yan Huang and Zhangxi Tan
4. Wei Tu and Ryan Waliany (next week)
5. Chris Portka and Rajesh Nishtala (next week)
6. Jingtao Wang and Ivan Tam (next week)
7. Boriska Toth and Albert Chang (next week)
   

Good and Bad Characteristics of Exam Questions:

• Keep questions simple: Test ONE concept per question.
• Test understanding of new knowledge -- not just rote learning of definitions.
• Make questions un-ambniguous. Use familar notation only. Give similar questions as in-class exercises and homework problems.
• Keep exam fair: Assure a represenative spread over all the material covered; have a variety of easier and harder questions.
• Avoid questions with many different correct answers that force you to re-think all the thoughts that the examinees may have gone through.
  
• Limit open-ended essay questions (they are hard to grade!)
• Make it clear in what form (and even where on the exam page) you expect to see the answer to each question.