First and second year CS courses at UW usually have full-time undergraduate tutor, who is the only person with 100% of their working time devoted to the course. This arrangement has obvious strengths, which I will detail, but it also leads to subtle weaknesses whose effects are harder to quantify.
The job is a co-op job, a four-month work placement in between two terms of school. The tutor coordinates the marking activities of the CS graduate students assigned to 251 for the term (each of them supposed to devote an average of either five or ten hours a week to the course) and holds by far the largest number of office hours, spending time in the Tutorial Centre helping students. They keep track of where instructors (in the case of research faculty, devoting 40% of our time over the course of a year to teaching) are in lecture, vets the assignments and tests that we draw up, and creates model solutions and marking schemes.
The tutor is responsible to the instructors, but does not report directly to them; his position is in the Instructional Support Group, and the permanent academic staff member who is his boss provides continuity in procedure from term to term. (This is what makes it possible to not have midterm conflicts in core courses, and to have assignments coordinated so that several are not due on the same day -- all of which become possibilities in third year.)
Professors in the Faculty of Arts typically have to do their own marking, and they have higher teaching loads than I do. Professors of computer science at other institutions have graduate TAs to do marking, as we do, but the professors typically have to manage the TAs themselves, even in first- and second-year classes. Here we have undergrad tutors for all courses labelled 1xx and 2xx, though not for third- and fourth-year courses. Since the tutors do not have the divided loyalties and distractions of the other course personnel, they are pretty effective at providing support.
So what could be wrong with such a system? It depends, for one thing, on the availability of good tutors. In today's economic climate, this is less of a problem, but during the dot-com boom it was hard to interest students in being tutors when corporations were clamouring for them. We have this problem with all course personnel, of course, from TAs to instructors, but since the tutor has more contact with students, it is a more important issue for them. If the tech sector takes off again, we may be faced with another shortage.
In managing assignments and TAs for instructors, the tutor provides a valuable service, but also diminishes the contact of instructors with those aspects of the course. I typically see the TAs for the first time at the midterm marking session, and I have no idea which of them can be trusted with the more difficult-to-mark questions. (If I remember, I ask the tutor in advance.) I don't see the students' submissions at all; at best I get a summary of common problems. It's not clear how much direct exposure to assignments would help me in adjusting classroom delivery, since we are usually several topics further on by the time a given assignment is marked. But it does increase my sense of being alienated from an important aspect of the course.
It might also make the transition to third and fourth year, where this support is not present, more difficult for some students who get used to the ease of being able to get one-on-one help within a few hours of running into a problem. But first year is already full enough of experiences throwing students into the deep end; we don't need to add to that. I can also see the case for not withdrawing such services in second year, where students are for the first time in danger of being put on academic probation.
So, overall, I think it is quite a nice system, and so do my envious colleagues at other institutions. It's not one of those things that typically gets mentioned when the quality of the educational experience at UW is discussed; sometimes less obvious points make quite a difference. --PR
(Adapted from a blog posting made October 12, 2003.)