Office Hours

TA Office Hours

TA office hours are an opportunity for students to get one-on-one or small-group help from the course staff. However, they have historically been a limited resource, especially towards the end of the quarter and/or near assignment deadlines.

The following guidelines are intended to help ensure that office hours are fair to both students and TAs

• Before asking a TA for help, you should tell the TA what you have already tried. Asking for help is of course encouraged, but you should attempt to problem-solve yourself first. Problem solving and debugging are crucial skills in programming that you should work on building throughout the quarter.

• TAs are not required or expected to stay past the end of their scheduled office hours. The default assumption should be that office hours will end at the scheduled time. If a TA chooses to stay past the end of their hours to continue helping students, they are doing so voluntairly and may need to leave at any time.

• TAs may decide to close the queue 15 minutes prior to the end of their scheduled office hours if there's a long line. The goal here is to be realistic about how many students  they will be able to help before the end of the office hours.

• We recommend arriving early during the office hours time before the line gets too long.

• If the there is a line, students should only ask one question at a time. You are welcome to re-queue afterwards if you have another question. This is to help ensure that TAs can help as many people as possible during the hour. During busy office hours, TAs will try to spend at most 5-10 minutes on each question before moving on to the next student.

• At the TA's discretion, if several students are working through the same concept, the TA may help all of the students at once in a small group in order to be more time-efficient.

The table below shows the office hours times for each week. Occasional changes to the schedule are to be expected. If a TA needs to cancel or reschedule their office hours, it will be announced on the Message Board.

Zach's Office Hours

Zach's office hours are for questions about course material or general computer science concepts. His office hours are not well-suited for specific questions about assignments; please use TA office hours for this purpose. To attend Zach's office hours, please use this calendar scheduling link to sign up for a 15-minute slot.