Teaching Tips

Grading

• Enter your grades at https://ssc.adm.ubc.ca/fsc/servlets/SRVFSCFramework.
• An explanation as to what the percentage grades translate into in terms of letter grades can be found at http://students.ubc.ca/calendar/index.cfm?tree=3,42,96,0.
• There has been a departmental policy that if a student fails a course because of a failed final exam, failed project, or other component of the course that must be passed in order to pass the course, the student's mark is the minimum of the computed mark for the term and a mark of 45. (If this is misquoted or no longer the case, someone please edit this entry.)
• Grad students must have an average of 80% and at least 72% in each course for it to count for their breadth requirements (see http://www/grads/affairs/Handbook.pdf)
• If you want to give a student an extension at the end of the term, in FSC, you can enter a "T" for Thesis in Progress or you can just leave it blank. If you enter "T", then you would need to submit the change of grade form when the student completes the course requirement. Some instructors prefer leaving it blank to avoid the paperwork. There is no published deadline for filling it out, and other students should be able to see their grades as long as you "submit" (not "save") the grades.

TAs

• Joyce Poon and the "TA coordinator" elected by CSGSA (see http://www.cs.ubc.ca/spider/csgsa/representatives.html#Other) will select your TAs for you. If you want TAs with particular backgrounds (e.g., classes on transcripts for the first years) and you don't think they'll be familiar with your needs, contact Joyce or the coordinator early!

Other

• There's a great set of resources for undergrad teaching at https://secweb.cs.ubc.ca/local/views/ta.shtml, including the great instructor manual at https://secweb.cs.ubc.ca/local/views/instructormanual/
• the Faculty of Science teaching page can be found at http://www.science.ubc.ca/index.htm?http://www.science.ubc.ca/teaching.htm
• Course scheduling for the following winter (no graduate courses offered in the summer) starts in February. As it is extremely difficult to find large size classrooms, instructors are encouraged to submit their course scheduling requirements for the following year as early as possible. Contact Joyce Poon if you want to schedule a grad course
• You can use https://ssc.adm.ubc.ca/fsc/servlets/SRVFSCFramework to give you a classlist for the classes you're teaching, or you can use the command "classlist [classnumber]" to give you a quasi-up-to-date listing.
• There's a calendar of dates at http://students.ubc.ca/calendar/download/IDatesandDeadlines.pdf. This calendar is awful. Surely there exists a better one. Does anyone know of a better one?
• The AMS has a database of old exams from classes at http://www.ams.ubc.ca/exams/index.cfm?subject=CPSC. Currently they only have exams from 315 and 430, but you may want to check there if you're planning on reusing things.
• The Tomorrow's Professor mailing list offers great teaching (and other university) tips. You can check out the archives at http://ctl.stanford.edu/Tomprof/index.shtml, or subscribe by sending mail to Majordomo@listsDELETEthisTEXT.stanford.edu with "subscribe tomorrows-professor" in the body.
• Have more to add? Click the edit button below and play around!