CS Grader Application for Spring ’25 will open in November; click here for link and information.
Any student who has completed CS2201 and at least one semester at Vanderbilt can apply to be a computer science grader. You must have completed a semester and have a GPA recorded in YES to apply. If you are currently in your first semester at Vanderbilt, you are not eligible. Preference is given to students with a strong history of performance in their courses (GPA), their past performance in the course they wish to grade for, their submitted video (for CS1101, 2201, 3251 and 3270 only), their seniority and if they have been a successful grader with us in the past. Master’s students are also eligible to apply and can apply in their first semester.
The application can be found here. Returning graders should have already contacted their supervising professors and should not fill out this application. PhD students should contact their advisor.
NOTE: a grader is an undergraduate or Master’s student who is assisting with a course. They might grade, hold office hours or perform other course duties as requested by the instructor. A TA or Teaching Assistant is a PhD student. These grader positions are open to PhD students and only PhD students can be TA’s.
Videos required to apply for 1101, 2201, 3251 and 3270
Because these courses require a lot of time spent in office hours with students, we want to be sure that we are hiring students with excellent tutoring skills. For this reason, applicants for any of these courses will be required to submit one 1-3 minute video. Your single video submission will cover your application for any and all of these four courses. Videos are not required for any other CS courses.
To submit your video:
- Create your video as described below
- Upload your video to YouTube as an unlisted (unsearchable) video. Instructions can be found here. You will need a YouTube account. You can create that with your Vanderbilt address or any other address.
- When the Grader application opens in November, there will be a textbox on the application where you can copy and paste the link to your video. Do not send videos to the DUS email or to any of the professors. Do not post the link as a comment to this post.
- Videos will remain the property of the creator (you) and will not be downloaded by the professors, only viewed. You are welcome to delete the video after the hiring process is over (first day of classes in August).
Read over the following prompts and select one to use in your video. Begin your video by stating your name, the course(s) you are applying for {1101, 2201, 3251, 3270} and which scenario you have chosen, 1, 2, or 3. Then begin your response. The video should only be at most 3-minutes long. You may not be able to completely answer the student in 3 minutes–that is fine–we are looking for a snapshot of how you would work with students, so if you are only part way through your explanation at the 3 minute mark, simply end the video.
Scenario 1: You are holding TA office hours and a student comes to you with the following question: “In today’s CS2201 lecture, the instructor gave an example of computing the size of a tumor/blob on an X-ray (the number of contiguous black pixels) by using a recursive solution. I do not understand how this algorithm works to correctly compute the size of the blob. Can you give me a quick explanation” Demonstrate your response to the student.
Scenario 2: Imagine you are an undergraduate grader for a CS course. During your office hours, a student approaches you with the following programming practice exercise (below) and asks, “I feel completely lost. I have no idea where to start.” Demonstrate how you would respond to the student’s question and guide them toward a successful implementation?
Write a method that returns the index of the next occurrence of a substring in a string. Inputs are the string, start index, and substring. If not found, return -1. DO NOT use built-in string methods. If the input is “heyhey-friend”, 1, “hey”, the output is 3 (where the second “hey” starts).
Scenario 3: During office hours a student in your class comes to you asking for help on the programming assignment. The assignment is to write a doubly-linked list data structure in C++ that supports insertion of new elements anywhere in the list. The student’s code is not passing all of the provided test cases and it is clear the student does not fully understand all of the possible corner-cases (such as first node, middle insertion, tail insertion, etc.) that the tests are trying to highlight. Demonstrate how would you begin to help this student on their assignment?
Remember, the video is only required if you are applying for any of {1101, 2201, 3251 or 3270}.
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