1 Availability

The Computer Science Department tries to make teaching assistants available to provide assistance at regularly scheduled times. Neither the Department, nor the teaching assistants, provide any guarantees of availability.

You should think of teaching assistants as a privilege, not a right. You should be happy when they are available, not annoyed and/or harmed when they are not (whether or not the schedule said someone would be available).

2 Role

A teaching assistant's job is to help you learn the course material, not to complete assignments for you.

They will try and answer your questions of a general nature, try to help you find your mistakes, and try to help you interpret error messages and output. To some extent, they will also try to help you understand assignments. Teaching assistants will not fix your code and/or write code for you.

Especially at busy times, but at other times as well, teaching assistants will only work with you for a few minutes during a single "session". They will then leave you to work on your own for awhile.

3 Prerequsites for Getting Help

The teaching assistants can't provide effective help unless you can both read code and refer to it using the appropriate terminology. Hence, before you are entitled to ask a question of the teaching assistants you must be able to ask it intelligently (and using the correct terminology), discuss it, and understand the answer.

A teaching assistant who decides that you have not asked a question properly or that you are not prepared to understand the answer, may politely inform you that they can't help. Such situations are your fault, not the fault of the teaching assistant.

4 Your Responsibilities

Remember that teaching assistants are students. In fact, they are students that only recently completed the course that you are taking. They sometimes make mistakes, give bad advice, and point you in the wrong direction. They are trying to help, but may not be able to. Rarely, they even make things worse.

You are ultimately responsible for all of the assignments in this course. The teaching assistants are in no way responsible for your work. They provide advice, you must decide whether you should heed their advice or not. Also, you must be sure not to ask them questions that would violate the Honor Code.

5 Interactions

Though teaching assistants are students, when acting in their role as teaching assistants they are JMU employees, and should be treated as such. Your interactions with them must be business-like/professional, not casual/personal.