Note that this is written in hindsight.

CPEN 211 (2024W1)

Definately my favourite TA experience (of the two). Prof. Tor Aamodt has CPEN 211 running like clockwork. The TA's jobs were simple, answer Piazza questions, do lab help, and mark labs. In general, the lab handouts were sufficiently detailed. Robust rubrics were provided for marking. The autograder was reasonably fair (wasn't great at giving partial marks). I'd imagine if a CI system was setup, as a pre-checkin for the autograder, the students would be a lot happier!

CPEN 212 (2024W2)

Dr. Alexandra Fedorova covered for Prof. Mieszko Lis for this class. The Prof wanted the TAs to spend as much time as possible with the students, which meant weekly lab help sessions.

Each TA was assigned ~14 students for the entire term to do the lab marking. I think this made it really unfortunate for students that got a terrible TA, as they basically spent their entire term asking for marks, and fixing incorrect gradings. I liked the rotation system in CPEN 211 a lot more.

Since we did offer regrades, I found that students should reach out about regrades regardless, as there's always a chance that a mistake was made, or a correction can be made for a penalty -> this applies to academic consessions as well.

Finally, there was a weird dynamic where the requirements were hidden from the students. This made it a bit awkward when giving advice to students (e.g. telling them to make assumptions). This is especially significant because the autograding tools were a bit of a black box, and any questions had to be redirected through Prof Fedorova to Prof. Lis.