Testimonials: EECS short-staffing hurts everyone

EECS short staffing is a big problem that I’ve faced both as a student and now as a uGSI. As a student, I feel like it’s sometimes nearly impossible to get help for classes, and if you do decide to join an office hours queue, you typically spend a few hours just waiting your turn in larger classes. I think this ends up discouraging a lot of students and they give up on trying to understand. More staffing would bring smarter, more prepared EECS experts into this world 🙂

As a TA, I would say it’s actually even worse. During office hours for CS 70, there is a queue of over 30 students waiting, and we only have the budget to hire 2-3 ASEs to staff the office hours. What ends up happening is we have to give fairly short answers / part of the solution itself instead of helping them build the intuition (which is what matters at the end of the day) which is terrible to have to do as a TA. It makes office hours a stressful experience where we feel like we have to get through hordes of students instead of getting to properly explain concepts and see students understand it – which is what makes teaching rewarding.

When a course is understaffed, staff has to work long hours and gets exhausted by the mountain of help requests and assignment questions they need to answer. Even when managing to stay within their allotted hours, us staff in the EECS department are often forced to leave our students because we are out of time to help them. From the staff perspective we feel overwhelmed and are not able to teach to our full capacity, and from the student perspective there is not enough assistance/support from a university that claims to be designed to work with students from all socio-economic backgrounds and make sure no student is left behind.

Before I started holding office hours, as a student taking these classes, I could never understand why OH queues were so long and it would take hours (sometimes crossing over into the next TA’s office hour slot) to have my question, however brief, answered. I’m sure this is the perspective that many in administration and students alike have encountered (though I would like to preface that every student I’ve worked with has been incredibly kind and understanding with the wait times – it’s what we expect at this point, after all).

As soon as I joined course staff, everything suddenly made sense. I try my best to get through the tickets but as soon as I step into our OH room, open up the queue, and see dozens of tickets, I know I absolutely won’t be able to get through all of them. This is especially disheartening when I walk in at the same time as a student and I know that, even though they were “on time” for my office hours, they’re probably going to be talking to the next TA. One time, I spent my hour-long office hours resolving tickets from the previous office hours slot. When I left, I noticed I hadn’t been able to get to a single ticket created during my slot.

I really enjoy helping students and want to give each of them the necessary space and time to work through solutions. But with the current staffing shortage, I don’t think it’s at all feasible for every student in our gigantic courses to get help. We can try to provide resources during OH, async on Ed, and so on – but that simply shifts the brunt of work to TAs (many of whom ALREADY go beyond their allotted hour appointments). These are students too. It’s exceptionally saddening to me that the university can’t support a department that has been so vibrant, so supportive within the student-body. The diversity of clubs and opportunities that are student-led in Berkeley EE/CS is exceptional. But the fact that the brunt always, always falls on the students is disappointing.

I’m now a PhD student at Berkeley, but I was also a student here in undergrad. For essentially any EECS course, I quickly learned that going to office hours was a lost battle. I took many of the CS courses (e.g. 61A/61B/170/188/189) and it was the same story in almost any of them: one would usually have to wait hours in overcrowded rooms to get assistance for 5 minutes by a very stressed TA. It was almost never worth it. And this is one of the few person-to-person interactions that we have access to in CS undergrad courses: lectures are often so massive that students are actively discouraged from going in person (because they would not fit in the classrooms), and sections are often full of students and already time constrained in getting through exercises. There is very little difference between doing an undergrad at Berkeley in CS or on Coursera. Most assignments are autograded. Exams are mostly multiple-choice questions that don’t really assess student’s understanding (because anything other than multiple-choice takes too long to grade). I’m all for teaching large courses and a large amount of people, but the funding and availability of TAs has to live up to this reality.

I was lucky to have incredible friends that enabled me to do well in Berkeley’s environment without course staff assistance, but it was very clear to me that the majority of other students didn’t have that kind of support network. This is not how teaching is supposed to work at a “leading university”. You’re not supposed to fend for yourself and sink or swim.

I’ve also TAed, both in undergrad and now during my PhD, and it’s clear and widely known and accepted even from the course-staff side that this is simply the reality of things. There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that TAs are exploited and the quality of the EECS education Berkeley is able to provide is severely bottlenecked by the minimal funding that is provided for courses. We get a lot of smart people here because of our name, and if they succeed it’s not because of what the University provides (they might in fact learn the same amount elsewhere, while being more supported): it’s because of the overwork of the TAs and their grit. Don’t point at educational outcomes as a measure of success.

The University has the money, and can pay for this. It’s the University’s duty – it’s just a matter of the administration taking responsibility and figuring out the logistics. There’s no excuse for exploiting TAs and not providing the primary service you’re meant to provide as a University – a tangible education.

Homework parties and office hours are often extremely busy, and students have to wait for close to an hour in order to get help. When students do get help, the staff member is often rushed by the length of the queue, and can only give a limited amount of help before moving onto the next person.

Student feedback also suffers with short staffing. 16A is one of many courses that doesn’t have enough readers to actually grade homeworks fully, so students get limited feedback on their assignments. Additionally, the self-grading system is not very transparent, because student grades have to be cross-referenced with limited staff grading, so students generally don’t have a good idea of how they’re doing in the class with respect to homework.

During onboarding I was told not to spend more than about 7 minutes per student in office hours. That’s not enough.

I often worked beyond hours as we didn’t originally have the hours to support running an extra hours discussion section, but it was clearly the right decision for our students to have.

I host office hours the day homework is due—I’ve regularly had to either mass-teach students in batches of near-dozen sizes, or only give students no more than fifteen minutes to ask for help; I believe this completely defeats the purpose of OH, which aims to provide individual, more personalized help to each students’ different situation. The nuances of catering to students’ different understandings of concepts + thought processes towards problems are completely lost when I’m forced to compress everybody into bite-sized OH slots. With more staffing, more students can get the help they came for!

I am constantly frustrated by the lack of support that CS61B can offer because I think I could do so much better, and learn so much more, if there were more course staff in CS61B. The course offers no small groups, relies on third-party tutoring sections to supplement the course, which are limited in availability. My ability to thrive in a course should not be determined by how quickly I can register for CSM. I should not be constrained by showing up 10 minutes after the start of a two hour office hour or risk never getting help, only for the TA to hustle me along. For classes this big, there should be more support from the school, not less.

Even before I became a course staff member for this class, which is the only class in Berkeley that offers programmatic interaction with physical manipulator-arm robots, this class already had a reputation for having low and overworked staffing. In fact, when I had just become a staff member, we had barely enough staff members to keep the class going. In the lab portion of the class, the absence of even just one staff member meant that some students would not get a chance to get help, ask questions, or finish their lab. I repeatedly saw my colleagues fatigued from the extra work they put in to make sure students were not left hanging in the air. I heard from students that they were disappointed at the fact that Berkeley, although known as a world class university with high tuition, was failing in its core mission to provide high-quality education.

There are many EECS/CS classes, including even the most important and core classes, such as computer security and operating systems, at risk of deteriorating, or outright disappearing due to the lack of staffing. Not only would it be much harder to restart the pipeline of uG/GSIs without existing staff, the disappearance of these courses will permanently tarnish Berkeley’s reputation as an authority in the realm of EECS/CS, and as a world-class research university. If the general population finds out that Berkeley has limited course offerings due to inability to hire staff or treat them with dignity, prospective students applying to college will second-guess their consideration of Berkeley EECS, since that would mean that they would have a limited academic experience and even worse, be a message that Berkeley does not value the experience of its students.

I need to graduate soon and I’ve been trying for two semesters straight to get a GSI position to complete my teaching requirements. Despite applying to a large set of courses (10+) each semester, I’ve been unable to get a position largely due to insufficient positions.

when I worked lab, it was impossible to clear the queue. students were extremely frustrated. I even cried after holding my first lab since even though I stayed an extra hour, there were still so many people left in the queue. For OH, I was the TA responsible for closing the queue, and was therefore often pressured to stay even up to an extra hour to clear the remaining tickets. Also, after proctoring for exams, there was still so much work to be done with scanning and grading the exams. I think the two head TAs at the time (Justin and Peyrin, not sure if names should be included) had pulled all-nighters and didn’t even have time to eat when doing exam grading and writing. Exam quality has also been affected by this in the past, with “broken questions” that have missing information or information that conflicts with other information in the question. exam writing is an extremely difficult process that requires many iterations of writing and practicing taking the exam. Also, many people have difficulty getting into their classes.

I arrived 10 minutes early to the CS 61b section I was staffing and slowly shouldered my way past the individuals crowding the doorway. I glanced up to see the queue spilling onto a third white board and the staff scurrying around, being careful to avoid the students spread out around the floor. The number of people in the room easily exceeded the maximum occupancy and with the Delta variant of Covid going strong I immediately felt uncomfortable being there. This was the norm for that class during project weeks. There were times where I didn’t get a chance to help a single student from my section because, for the entire three hours, we were clearing out the queue from earlier in the day. Even when we did get around to helping them we often were underprepared to offer proper support due to the limited training time being focused on labs and not projects. Having more staff would allow faster processing of the queue and for us to give students the help and support they actually need.

For my first time holding office hours as a TA, I was working alone to help around 15 students. I only had the room booked for an hour and there was another class holding office hours in the same room immediately after so when the hour hit I had to announce my office hours were over even though I was not able to get to everyone who had put their name on the queue. I remember 2 students specifically being really disappointed and saying that they knew it would happen. I never saw those 2 students again and I would not be surprised if they dropped the course. While it is always frustrating to feel like you failed a student, this was especially painful in that it felt like I was failed to support my community. It is always discouraged to see the diversity in CS and EECS decrease in upper division courses and it is often these students who suffer the most from understaffed. Coming from a lack of resources or not having years of experience of prior knowledge results in situations in which hard work alone is not enough to succeed in EECS. Without the consistent and reliable support of TAs, and GSIs, pursuing EECS becomes physically and mentally unsustainable, leaving students which no choice to abandon pursuing the major. Everyone should have the opportunity to succeed in EECS and short-staffing only leads to situations in which TAs are killing themselves working overtime to provide support to students, while those who are unable to get support are left feeling inadequate in their abilities and discouraged to continue pursuing EECS.