New CS 100 ISA Guide

If you are planning for a year, sow rice; if you are planning for a decade, plant trees; if you are planning for a lifetime, educate people.– Chinese Proverb

Welcome Guide

Welcome to being a CS 100 ISA! Congratulations on being hired. The previous ISA’s hope you have a wonderful term. This site is meant to provide a few instructions on how things work and what you need to do. It is not a complete guide, and we hope you keep adding to it! Also note that since this course is constantly changing and developing there may be things which become obsolete, but we hope this provides you with a reference for what a CS 100 ISA typically does and a framework for how your term will look.

What To Expect

Every week, you will have a list of tasks that you need to complete. This includes things from marking, proofreading assignments, communicating with students and so on. Some weeks, you will feel like you have nothing to do, however, it will pick up quite quickly. Just be prepared for all the assignments you need to mark so you don’t fall behind! Most importantly, be sure to touch base with your supervisor so you can update them with your progress.

Weekly Activities

This section goes over some of the weekly activities that you need to complete. It also provides a checklist to help make your life easier.

Welcome Guide

Every week there are multiple tasks that need to be completed in a timely manner. Main tasks include marking, replying to students, holding office hours proofreading next weeks content, and running labs and attending lectures (if course is in-person that term). Here is an example day-to-day list of tasks you might need to complete and when you should finish them.

On Campus Tasks

If the course is being offered on campus, this section will go over some of the weekly activities that come along with attending in-person classes, including hands-on exercises, group discussions, and lab sessions. It will guide you through what you can expect for the week, as it will be slightly different from the online offering.

Here is an example day-to-day list of tasks for a week where an assignment was due on the Wednesday, labs were held on Monday, and lectures were every Tuesday and Thursday (the schedule will look different depending on when things are due/scheduled that term). Note that if assignments are bi-weekly then your weeks will look different depending on whether an assignment is being released that week or not, which can be seen below.

Weekly Tasks

To make sure every ISA does their fair share of work, we came up with this simple template to easily divide the work. This template can be easily recreated in Excel and modified for more ISA’s if needed. An example template can also be found in the CS 100 folder if you’d like to use that.

Each of the letter’s A, B, and C here represent a different ISA. If the number of ISA’s is not 3, this format will need to be edited by shifting responsibilities to another ISA. In recent terms we have used the discussion board or had/needed an evening office hour, so that column can be removed if there are only two ISAs. The dates should be adjusted to the appropriate dates for your term. The start is identified as Saturday and end as Friday. This makes sure that everything is accounted for over the weekends, though you aren't required to respond to emails/messages during the weekend.

Scheduling

In terms of scheduling meetings or office hours, be sure to work around everyone’s schedule and ask if everyone is comfortable with what they have. Some people will not speak up unless asked so it is always a good idea to ask everyone directly.

Communication

This section goes over some of the ways you will be interacting with students along with how to use the different ways. One thing that isn’t talked about here is the different situations that might arise when dealing with students. Some of these situations will be covered during the Coffee and Learn meetings. However, when in doubt, be sure to consult with the other ISA’s or your supervisor. Let the student know that you will get back to them at a later date and ask someone else (Be sure to get back to them).

Email

In terms of accessing you email, you can use the following link. https://outlook.office.com/mail/cs100@uwaterloo.ca/ . Things do change from time to time so be sure to check in with your supervisor if there is a new link or new way to access the email.

Teams

Using Teams is relatively simple, and you probably already have experience with this. Just be sure to reply to students’ questions in a timely manner. Office hours will be held through Teams too.

There will likely be three channels on the course Team: "General", "Office Hours", and "Questions and Answers".

• The "General" channel can be used for general communication with all students, though should be used sparingly and not for announcements (these should be done on Learn) since many students don't check Teams often (in Fall 2024 we primarily used this channel when we wanted to provide students with files, such as HTML files for the labs).
• The "Office Hours" channel is used to remind students when office hours were occuring and provide a space for students to request to meet online (see "Office Hours" section below).
• The "Questions and Answers" channel is a place for students to ask any questions they have about course material that they are comfortable with being public; it is an alternative to asking questions through email, and replaced Learn discussion boards in recent terms.

Discusison Board

This one is also relatively simple but has not been used for many terms, though that may change in a future term. If it is used, be sure to check this as some students will post questions here that often get missed by the ISAs. The board can be found by going to the following menu:

Announcements

Announcements should mainly be used for communicating major items. Try to avoid having multiple announcements for small issues as that can clog up students’ inboxes and diminish the importance of the announcements (if many small issues do come up at once you could list them all in one announcement). The main reasons you will be using announcements for include:

• Release of marks, and remark requests
• Start of week updates
• Any major outages or events

Office Hours

Your supervisor will inform you of how many hours you need to do for office hours. These should be scheduled within the first week of classes. You should update the course webpage by going into the public_html folder and editing the index.html file. To access the course account folder, follow the instructions under Course Accounts.

Office hours are typically held in the CS Consulting Centre (MC 4065) and/or online, on the course Team. On work-from-home days you can hold your office hours online, but on days when you are in the office you should hold in-person office hours, with the option for people to join online if needed.

General instructions for booking and using a section of MC4065 are given in either ISA training or the first Coffee and Learn, and a file with instructions should be shared to an ISA Team channel.

General Communication Tips

Students can sometimes be rude or harsh when emailing or asking questions. This shouldn’t be taken to heart as it is mainly because they are stressed with deadlines from multiple courses. Be sure to always reply politely and stay calm.

Marking

Marking will be what you do for majority of the job. Most days will include marking. It can get quite tedious after a while but being able to properly manage your time will make it a lot easier. This section talks about all the details and things you need to know for marking.

Splitting Marking

There are two ways to go about splitting the marking between the ISAs.

First is to split the students into groups so that each ISA marks the entire quiz for a certain number of students. This is a better choice as it helps keep things consistent for students, as some ISAs mark harsher and some are more lenient, so using this first method is better for assignments so that the entire quiz is marked consistently. To keep things fair overall, the ISAs will switch which group they do for each assignment. This was outlined in the weekly tasks section.

The other method is to have each ISA mark certain questions for all students. This helps keep the marking consistent for that particular question itself, and is the method used for marking the midterm and final exams, as in for these two there is no rotation of groups such as with assignments, as mentioned above. Additionally, the exams are marked on Crowdmark, which makes it easier to mark by question as opposed to groups.

Marking Schemes

Marking schemes are extremely important to make sure that everyone is on the same page. There are usually no TAs to help with marking for CS 100 so it helps reduce the number of people that need to be informed about how to mark.

The marking schemes are usually available from previous terms. If an assignment is made brand new, the instructor should provide the marking scheme. If you guys created the assignment, be sure to create it with an appropriate marking scheme in mind.

Before even releasing the assignment, during the proofreading of the assignments you should also be proofreading the marking scheme, as it may make sense to change the number of marks allocated to a question (which would need to be changed in the Learn quiz before release), or the marking scheme may have to change if the wording of the question changes, etc...

Marking schemes should also be checked over during the marking meeting to make sure everyone is on the same page. Try to follow the marking scheme as closely as possible, however there will always be cases that the marking scheme doesn’t cover. For cases like this, we suggest making an ‘A# Comments’ document where each ISA types up the specific case for each question and how many marks/deductions correspond to that case. This is useful in case another ISA wants to see if a similar case was encountered before so that they can be consistent. If you ever encounter something that's not covered in the marking scheme, you should first check that document to see if it's been covered already, then if not either discuss with your fellow ISAs how you'd like to handle it and then add it to the doc, or just add your solution yourself if it's straightforward enough.

Marking Meetings

Aside from marking schemes, marking meetings are even more useful in making sure the marking is consistent. In this term we held them the day after the assignment was due, but in the past we've also held them between the release date and the due date so we could get a jump on marking and mark them as they came in. They should be held a day or two after the due date at the latest in order to not fall behind on marking. During this meeting, one ISA should pull up the assignment submissions on their screen (and share their screen if meeting online), and go through around 3-7 assignments; the number varies depending on the level of difficulty of the assignment, you should get an idea after marking a couple together how many need to be done so everyone feels comfortable. This allows the other ISAs to share their opinion on how the marking should be done so that everyone is on the same page. At this time you should also have the marking scheme up and the 'A# Comments' document (see above) so you can add comments to it.

Auto-marking Scripts

The HTML/CSS Assignments have scripts to help in marking html and CSS pages. These aren't used every term, as we've found marking them by hand to be just as efficient, and the allocation of marks for these assignments has changed throughout terms. However, you are welcome to use them if you think they'd be helpful, but they will likely need to be edited first, particularly to reflect the current marking scheme.

The documentation for these is on the course account under the folder "Marking Tools".These scripts are not perfect, however they are better at detecting presence of elements rather than absence. When marking with them, double-check that missing elements are actually missing. Once you mark 10-20 this way, you will get a feel for the types of mistakes the scripts make.

1. Drag the scanner .py folder into the python launcher. To do this, type "Python launcher" into the search bar and look for a rocket ship on your Dock. You can then drag the python file to that rocket ship and the script will run.
2. Right click the script and use 'Open With' and choose 'IDLE' which is the python launher.
3. Open terminal, type in cd/desktop/html_scanning and then press ENTER. Then type python3 assignment_7_scanner.py and press ENTER again.

There is also a marking tool for the "Buzzfeed Quiz" HTML assignment, a script that will auto-select the first option for each question of the quiz, which is necessary for marking as we need to validate the results of selecting each first option. The script and instructions for how to implement it can be found in the course account by going to: Archives->1249 Archive->Assignments->A3->A3 Marking Tool.docx.

Releasing Grades

Finally, once all marking is done, it is time to release grades. Make sure all assignments have been marked. An easy way to check is to go into the grading option for an assignment and click on Show Search Options.

Then, you should see options to filter the assignments.

Before you filter, be sure you have it set to show by User. You do not want to be looking at assignments for a particular group here. Here, you can tick the Pending Evaluations box and then click the little magnifying glass in the search option. Clicking Apply will not apply the filter settings. You should now be able to see all evaluations that have not been marked. Once you have made sure that everything is marked, set the filter back to Unpublished Evaluations and click the magnifying glass. Then, you want to make It so that more assignments are shown per page.

Select 200 per page here. This will make our lives a bit easier.

Click on the tick mark to select all students on that page. Then you can click on Publish to publish their grades. Make sure to go onto the second page and publish grades for the remaining students if necessary.

Late Days

In this course the students are allowed to use five grace days to avoid late submission deductions, but they can only use two for any one assignment, as we only accept assignments two days after the official due date at the latest. Because of this, we need to keep track of how many late days have been used by each student.

Remarks

There will definitely be mistakes while marking no matter how careful you are. Hopefully, the student themselves will notice this and point it out through remarks. There are already setup remark surveys on Learn that will allow the student to request a remark.

Marking Tips

To help make marking faster, there are some things you can do.

Assignments

Aside from marking, another big part of your job is proofreading assignments. In some cases, you might even need to create assignments. This section will go over some of the common tasks that you need to do and how to do them.

Proofreading Assignments

At the start of every week, you need to proofread next weeks assignment. Proofreading is not just checking the questions to see if the answers make sense. It involves checking a lot more. Some of the things that you need to check for involve:

• You need to check the assignment overview to make sure all the due dates make sense and the text on that page makes sense.
• Check if the links work on every page and if they lead to the correct page
• Check if the images are working
  • Many quizzes usually have broken images. Be sure to thoroughly check for these as fixing this after the quiz has gone live is hard
• Check if the instructions are appropriately updated and if everything makes sense
• Go through the quiz and see if all the choices are correct
• Check that the wording of the questions all make sense and that there aren't multiple ways to interpret something
• Check if the grades on the quiz match the marking scheme and the section under the Grades
  • This is very important. If there is a mismatch between the grades and the marking scheme, it will cause a lot of troubles later. Be sure that the number of grades is the same.

When proofreading assignments, it's a good idea to preview the quiz (click on the dropdown and select "preview" instead of "edit") and go through it as if you were a student, so look through the questions from a student's perspective before you even look at the marking scheme; this can help you figure out if there's any confusing/ambiguous wording, etc...

Quizzes

The quiz on Learn is where the actual assignment takes place. On online offerings in the past there were 3 parts to each assignments which are separated into individual pages on the quiz; these three were multiple choice, short answer, then major component (ex. Excel file or HTML webpage). However, in the in-person offering (such as F24) there wasn't such a separation, some assignments had a mix of different questions types like matching, ranking, short answer, etc..., but the HTML assignment only had the major component. In the future there may be a mixture of these different types.

Excel Assignments

In this course offering Excel had been removed from the course so we did not have any Excel assignments. If Excel is a part of the course during your term and you'd like more info on them, there is info in previous ISA manuals, as well as archives of previous term's assignments.

Labs

Another large portion of this job when it is offered in-person is handling labs. As an ISA you will be responsible for preparing lab content and running one or more lab sections.

Preparing Labs

During labs you will be giving students a printed off workbook of questions and/or a file to work on which need to be prepared in advance.

You can find copies of previous labs in the course archives (particularly 1245, 1249, and 1251 as those were in-person terms). You may wish to change up these questions and/or add new ones, and will likely have to move things around at some point depending on what gets covered during certain lectures in your offering. When creating new questions, it is usually a good idea to make some that are somewhat similar to what the students will see on the assignments to help prepare them, but it's also good to add some harder and/or more open-ended questions to get them thinking, especially since you have more opportunity to discuss during labs.

You will have a lab meeting with the course instructor ahead of the lab, probably the day before, to go over it and finalize the questions. You should have the lab prepared as much as possible before this meeting, this is just to have the instructor look over and approve it, and sometimes make changes/additions, for example if a certain topic wasn't reached in lectures. Though the whole lab period is 2 hours, we try to aim for about 45 minutes to an hour of actual content so that there is open time after if anyone wants to ask questions, so keep this in mind when preparing questions.

After the meeting you'll print off a copy of the lab worksheets for each student. You should then staple each lab together (many labs are multiple pages long), and divide them into piles according to lab sections (we separated them with labelled post-it notes) so you can easily grab your section's lab. If providing the students with a digital file for the lab, such as for the HTML/CSS unit, then this should be made available to the students at the start/right before the lab; we posted them to the "General" channel of Teams and directed the students to look there. Instructions for how to set up the printer should be given the first week on the job, and post-it notes and staples can be found in the supply closet.

One last thing you should have prepared before the lab is a document to record the participation mark (as long as they attended and completed the lab they get the mark). We used an excel sheet for this since it made it easy to upload the marks to FileMaker (see below). A template for what we did can be found in the 1249 archive on the course account, but feel free to modify it to suit your needs.

Running Labs

At the beginning of the lab period you should hand out the lab packages, one to each student, even if they are working in groups. There are instructions for the students for how the lab runs on the lab templates, but you may wish to explain them and general lab rules at your first lab. During the labs you should be available to answer questions and be walking around periodically to see if anyone needs help and how far along the students are. After around 45 minutes, or whenever it seems like most people have finished, you should start taking up the answers on the board. Go through the solutions, explaining the answer/concept, making sure to ask the students if the have any questions. The lab rooms often don't have whiteboard markers so be sure to bring one if need be, and if you need to use the projectors the code to access them is 411.

Once students have completed the lab they can bring it to you to show you to receive their participation mark; they can do this at any time, and once they do you can let them leave. You don't need to read over every response, just make sure they've completed each question, and then check them off in your document and return their lab to them so they have it to study with. I also like to sign their lab when I marked them off, so that they had a record that they got the participation mark.

After taking up the answers, any remaining time should be treated as additional office hours, where students can come to your with any questions they have. Af the 2 hour mark or if the students have all left before then you are welcome to leave, but before the 2 hours are up as long as any of the students are in the lab still you should remain in the room, even if the students are just working and aren't asking questions.

After Labs

After each lab has finished you will need to upload the lab marks to FileMaker. This can either be done by manually entering each student's grade (0 or 1), but it is easier to just import an Excel file.

If you have never accessed the course's file maker, here's how to do so. Download and launch the FileMaker program. On the left-hand side, select the "Favorites", then click on "Add App" and select "From Hosts...". From here, beside the "Search Hosts" bar you should see a plus sign, click on this and beside "Host's Internet Address:" type in filemaker.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca and click save. You should now see a list of databases, select "CS100Marks" and click "OK". You will now have the CS100 database saved so you can access it whenever you enter FileMaker; to enter the database it will prompt you to enter your username and password, if you don't have that yet ask Barb/your ISC.

Once in FileMaker, to manually enter the lab grade simply navigate to the "Labs" section and enter a 0 if they didn't attend or a 1 if they did attend. The better way to enter marks however is to use the import feature. While on the "Labs" tab, on the ribbon the the very top of the screen (beside the apple logo) go to the "File" dropdown and select "Import Records", then "File". Select the lab participation marks from your local files (you should be using a shared excel file, so make sure to download a copy before going to upload), then when it gives you a list of worksheets select "Entire Class". At the top, if it isn't already set the import type to "Update". Then, make the WATIAM source field be the "Match Field" connected to the "Username" target field, and make whatever lab you are on be the source field that imports to the corresponding target field, and set all other fields to "Don't Import". After you've checked that everything is set properly, select "Import". After importing the lab marks will automatically be filled in, but you should do a quick check to make sure they all imported correctly.

Common Student Questions

Each of the major modules will have repeating questions. There are always a few common ones that arise due to simple user error. If you find a question that is not listed here, please be sure to add it! This will make the lives of future ISAs much easier.

Excel

There was no Excel unit this term for no FAQ for that topic.

HTML/CSS

The main questions arose from HTML/CSS. Many people were wondering why their HTML and/or CSS changes wouldn’t appear. Usually, the files weren’t in the same folder, or the file names has errors in them when references in the HTML file. Something as seemingly small as using .jpg instead of .jpeg will cause images to not appear.

CyberDuck

There will be a lot of questions for errors on uploading files, which it's a good idea to have the students try CyberDuck file uploads before the (first) HTML assignment is due, so you can work through the problems with them ahead of time.

JavaScript Quiz

The main issue with this one was that pressing the Submit button on their quizzes would do nothing. For this, there are a couple things you need to check. First, make sure that the brackets are properly matched in the weights. If you even miss one bracket, or use the wrong bracket, the quiz will not work. Also, make sure the use commas after each bracket. Without the commas, the quiz will not work.

Learn

Learn is currently what the course uses for content delivery. This might have changed in the future, and if it does, please be sure to update this section.

Test Student

If you want to see what the Learn page looks like from the view of the student, you need to make use of the Test student. To access this, first access the class list:

Once here, you want to click on the Test Student option:

Then click on the little downwards arrow beside the Test Student. You can pick either one. From this menu, you can click on Impersonate:
Confirm that you want to and then you will be able to see the course as you were a student in the course. To exit this view, simply logout and log back in.

Helpful Tips

For Learn itself, be careful before deleting anything. Always double check with your supervisor. When you need to upload a hidden file, first upload a blank text file, and change that to hidden from students. Then you can replace that file with the file you want to upload. This is helpful when uploading marking schemes or answer keys as when you first upload it, it is available for students to see.

Archive the Course

To archive the course at the end of the semester, simply copy all assignment questions into individual Word files (one assignment per file). You can include the answer key/marking scheme in the same document with question, or attach as a seprate file within the assignment folder, just remember keep it consistent. Once copied, upload all the files into a single folder within the course account, specifically in the Archives Folder. Don't forget to include the current term in the folder name!

Course Accounts

The course account consists of the folder for the course where you can access all of the previous terms assignments and backups. This is helpful in case you need to go back to reference anything, or you need inspiration for new questions.

Exam

The exam for this course is the one of the major components of the course for the students. It is very tedious to mark. The creation of the exam should be done by the instructor.

Exam Marking

As there are no TAs for this course, exam marking will take up a lot of time. This will be similar to marking assignments; however, you will be using Crowdmark. For this, it is better to choose certain questions to mark rather than marking the entire exam for a group of students.

Review Sessions

Holding at least 2 review sessions for the students is a good idea. A mix of in-person sessions and online is ideal.

Things To Change

There are a few things that bothered us during the term that we would have preferred to change if possible. Things such as:

• Remove the discussion board. Only a few students use it, and it just isn’t active enough. A better idea would be to have Piazza or something else where students can anonymously post. Also, the Learn discussion board is rarely used by other classes. Being able to post anonymously allows a lot more students to post and ask questions.
• When uploading the HTML files to the Dropbox in the quiz, Learn seems to change the fie by removing the header and other important aspects. This makes marking very hard as one cannot see what the original file was. Now, if the student uploads the file to the servers, the ISA can download it from there to see the original file. There might be a setting somewhere in Learn that allows us to change this effect or you can ask students to compress their files before uploading them which prevents this issue.

Common Mistakes/Pitfalls

This section goes over some of the things we fell for or didn’t do properly. Hopefully this serves to help future ISAs avoid any similar mistakes.

Falling Behind On Marking

Falling behind on the marking of one assignment can lead to a huge domino effect. If the grades for one assignment are released late, the marking for the next one will also start late and those grades will probably be released later too. This leads to all future assignments being released late and students not receiving the feedback they need to work on future assignments.

Discrepancy between Excel Template and Instructions

This was a major issue for the F22 ISA team. There were major discrepancies between the Excel template and the screenshots on the instructions for A6. This caused a lot of issues with students emailing us as they couldn’t check their answers.

Marking Discrepancies

Another issue that arises when marking assignments is discrepancies in how the marking scheme is viewed. Even after the marking meetings, there will be multiple cases that are unique and need to be dealt with. These cases are simply different ways a student might answer a question that can be considered right but aren’t 100% right. In these cases, always communicate with the other ISAs! It is better to send a simple message now rather than have to remark multiple students later on.

Late Communications

When students send emails, try to reply to them promptly everyday. If emails are sent after hours, the students should expect a reply to the next day. However, if there is a major deadline, ISAs should be present to reply to emails throughout the day. The ISAs can set certain hours later in the day to reply to emails.

Update Log

Site created and information added – January 8th, 2025.