CS 170 Application
What other responsibilities will you have next semester?
Currently planning 3 techs, 1 breadth and ~7 hours a week of research (and full-time recruiting which hopefully won’t drag too long into the semester).
Why do you want to be a TA for CS 170?
A few reasons. First and probably foremost, I really enjoyed my time as a 170 reader in Fall 2019; in particular, I really liked the culture on course staff, which was academic but playful, rigorous but supportive, and generally filled with hardworking, talented people who were inspiring and from whom I learned a lot about pedagogy, algorithms and many things in between. While most of the faces next semester would probably be new to me, I’m confident that the head TAs would instill that same culture in next semester’s course staff, and I think it would be a fun and very rewarding experience to be part of it. I’d also like to grow as a teacher and mentor, and I think being a 170 TA would be a great way for me to do that. As a reader, when I would talk to a student about a homework or discussion problem, I would often realize five minutes later that there was a much clearer way I could’ve explained the problem, or helped them out in a way that didn’t hint towards the answer as much. After having shadowed Vishnu’s section and taken notes on things like good toy examples for the Ford-Fulkerson algorithm, common misconceptions about multiplicative weights, and pedagogical practices like “Smarties” to keep student engaged, I think I’m much better prepared to teach CS170 material in a more focused, concrete way, keeping in mind pedagogy strategy as well as my previous mistakes. More broadly speaking, I’m interested in contributing towards the course in a more meaningful way than I was able to do as a reader. From internal development to discussion metas, project debugging to coding workshops, I think there’s no shortage of work on course staff’s plate for next semester, and I would love to be a more involved part of those decisions and efforts. Finally, I really like CS170! I think it has a pretty steep learning curve, but the payoff (NP-completeness and reductions, my favorite part of the course) makes it worth it. As a first-time TA, I would really enjoy interacting with the material in a new way, and be able to show students through my passion and enthusiasm why 170 is such a rewarding class.
Please write 2-3 sentences for each of the above positions that you are interested in and why you are a good fit for the position. (8 hour TA, 20 Hour Pedagogy TA)
As a former 170 reader, I think the 8-hr TA position would be the best logical fit for me. If anything, I’m interested in potentially being a 20-hour Pedagogy TA (see response below).
Describe a possible area of improvement for a class you have previously been involved with. What changes would you make?
I’ve had a few conversations with Rishi about some of the initiatives he worked on implementing in 170 this semester. For the sake of transparency, I’ll give my thoughts on something that we haven’t discussed.
I think plagiarism/cheating on HWs in 170 is a tricky problem to solve, and there isn’t really a clean way to address the problem on a course staff level (apart from blindingly obvious cases, it’s pretty difficult as a reader to determine when students are cheating off of each other, especially if the same reader doesn’t grade both homeworks). Therefore, I think the the best way to tackle the problem is the root cause (students being lazy/busy/choosing to spend their time on something else), and I have a potential improvement - gold points.
I really liked Prof. Hug’s gold points idea from 61B, and we would probably need his permission to implement something like this. In a nutshell, gold points are similar to extra credit points, but how effective they are is inversely proportional to how well you’re performing on the exams. Potential complications include the fact that 170 exams are curved, which would make the gold point calculation a bit icky (probably relying on z-scores) and difficult to make public. However, there are some reasons why I think this might be worth implementing:
- It would help us smooth out homework difficulty - when I was a reader and student, there were a couple weeks in the course when homework were notoriously long/difficult. I don’t have a problem with hard homeworks, but I think it’s slightly unfair to the students to be a given a homework with significantly higher workload than anything they’ve been given in the past, with no warning. Assigning a question or two (or a subpart or two) to be worth gold points would lessen the workload for students who feel comfortable about their position in the class, and allow struggling students to raise their standing in the class. We do already have extra credit points, but they apply only to homework and with max homework scores being capped anyway, arguably have very little impact.
- It would ease psychological stress while not making much of a difference in practice - I think a somewhat common concern that I’ve heard about 170 is that the exams are worth quite a lot of your grade, and since we’ve never had a clobber policy (to my knowledge), it’s pretty easy for students to be disheartened after poor performance on an exam. Gold points would be a big psychological boost for struggling students, as they would know that gold points would help them more than most of the population, so make them feel like they have a better shot at digging themselves out of a hole. In practice, however, since we can fine-tune the algorithm/scoring, we would have a lot of control on the impact that gold points would have, and we could ensure that they don’t make a statistically significant difference to the overall grade boundaries (or a minimal one at that).
If CS 170 goes virtual in Fall 2020, what can we do to make the students’ experience better? How can you contribute to that? Please describe any specific skills that might be relevant.
If 170 goes virtual, I think the most useful change on a course staff level would be to try to make discussion sections smaller. I wasn’t at Berkeley for the semester so I’m not sure what Zoom discussions are like, but I can imagine them being significantly less social and personable than regular discussions, with it being easier than ever to zone out and literally go AFK. To address this problem, I propose having a short presentation at the beginning of each discussion led by the TA, and then breaking out into 2-3 discussions rooms, with one room led by the TA and the other rooms by readers.
Obviously this will require significantly more work than currently expected on the readers’ part, but I truly think it’s the best way that students aren’t thrown into 20-30 person Zoom discussion rooms where they’re even more hesitant to speak up than usual (the chat feature is nice, but it’s no substitute for asking a question and getting an immediate, clarifiable response). I think this will require the TA and her group of 1-2 readers to work closely together for a couple hours each week to make sure that they are on the same page, but I think that’s useful in two ways—first, it’ll provide more interactivity between readers and TAs (which is always welcome as a reader), and second, it should ease the burden on brainstorming and planning for the TA as well. Finally, it’ll also be a great transition/preparation for the readers as potential future TAs.
In terms of what I might be able to contribute to this initiative, I was involved with CSM for 3 semesters, including one as coordinator, so I know a lot about designing, organizing, and teaching small group sessions. I would be more than happy to be a part of the organizing/planning committee that might potentially make this change a reality.
We want to find $C(x) = A(x)B(x)$, and since $A$ and $B$ are degree-3 polynomials, we know that $C$ will be a degree-6 polynomial. Therefore, we need the values of $C$ at least 7 points in order to uniquely determine the coefficients of the polynomial. To evaluate $C = AB$ at at least 7 points, we use FFT on $A$ and $B$ with $n=8$, as $8 = 2^{ }$.
uid: 202005172237 tags: #applications