Office Hours Instructions

If you would like to get help at office hours, you must sign up for office hours at this website:

https://cs121-officehours.cs.uchicago.edu/

This website will allow you to place a request to attend office hours on the current day. You will be able to specify your availability that day (so you are not scheduled at a time when you are in class, etc.), and will receive an e-mail notification when you have been assigned to a specific time slot (you can also log into the website to see the status of your request). Make sure to add the e-mail address cs121-officehours@mailman.cs.uchicago.edu to your address book to prevent these notifications from being flagged as spam.

Please note that we will generally schedule students once we are ready to see them; you should not expect to be pre-scheduled far in advance.

For in-person office hours, you may sometimes get just 10-15 minutes notice that we are ready to see you, and you must make your way to office hours within that timeframe. So, we encourage you to plan to be in Crerar Library (where all in-person office hours take place) during the times you requested (there are lots of common areas where you can work or hang out while you wait to be assigned a slot). That said, you should also be fine as long as you are no more than 5 minutes away from Crerar by foot.

When you log into our scheduling website, you will see a page like this:

../_images/office-hours-1.png

To place a request, you must enter the following information:

  • Select the time slots you are available at. While we will try to schedule you at the earliest available time, please note that you may be scheduled at any of those times, so it is important that you select times you are certain you will be available. If your availability changes throughout the day, you will be able to edit your request later on.

  • Notice how there may be slots marked as “Online”. If you select one of these slots, an additional field will appear for you to provide a Zoom meeting URL (an instructor or TA will join that Zoom once they’re ready to see you). We suggest you enter the URL of your “Personal Meeting” on Zoom. This URL will look something like this: https://uchicago.zoom.us/j/1234567890?pwd=dfds9nvsdlkjhvsd98dvnd098dvsn. You are also welcome to create an ad-hoc Zoom meeting so you don’t have to share your Personal Meeting; however, if you do so, please make sure you select the “Recurring meeting” option when creating the meeting, and set the “Recurrence” option to “No Fixed Time”.

  • You will need to specify whether you have a “quick question” (that you expect won’t take more than 1-3 minutes), or a “regular” question (e.g., if you need help debugging your code). Please note that, in general, if you need help debugging your code, you should select “regular”. We will also enforce the 3 minute limit for quick questions; if your question turns out to be longer than that, we will ask you to submit a new request with a “regular” question.

  • Describe the issue you need help with. You don’t have to be as detailed as you would on a Ed Discussion post, but you do need to give us a sense of what you need help with.

Once you have filled out the form, and clicked Submit, you will be shown a screen like this:

../_images/office-hours-2.png

From this screen you can click on “Edit your request” to edit your request. In fact, if your availability changes or you have additional details to provide, we encourage you to edit your request.

You can also cancel your request. Doing so will not affect your standing in future requests and, once you cancel your request, you will be allowed to make another request for the same day if you wish.

Once you have made your request, we will try to schedule you at the earliest time we can and, for the most part, we will process requests on a first-come-first-serve basis, with a few exceptions:

  • We prioritize concrete and detailed requests over speculative requests. i.e., if you articulate the exact issue you’re running into, you will be seen sooner than if you just specify “My code doesn’t work” or if you enter any sort of placeholder text in your request.

  • We prioritize students who need help getting unstuck over students who just want a TA or instructor to review code that is already working.

  • We typically try to answer 2-3 quick questions for every longer question we get.

  • We prioritize students who made a request a previous day and were ultimately not seen that day.

If you’d like to get a sense of how many students are waiting to be seen at office hours, click on the “Status” link at the top of the page.

If we schedule you for a specific time slot, you will receive an e-mail notification, and your request’s status will also be updated on the website (make sure to refresh the page to see the latest status):

../_images/office-hours-3.png

For in-person office hours, the notification will include the room you must go to for office hours. Please make sure to make your way to that room within the provided time slot. If you do not, you will be marked as a no-show.

For online office hours, please make sure that you are on the provided Zoom call during the time you’ve been assigned. If an instructor/TA joins the Zoom call and you are not there, you will be marked as a no-show.

Please note that, if you are assigned a time slot and it turns out you are not available at that time, you can cancel your request without prejudice (cancelling your request after being scheduled will have no impact on future requests, unlike failing to show up altogether, which may result in your next request being de-prioritized). If you would like to be seen at a different time, you will need to submit a new request.

Office Hours expectations

Our goal at office hours is to make sure that you leave in a better position to make progress on the assignment. In some cases, if you have an issue that requires debugging your code, we may not be able to fully debug your code during office hours. In some cases, if the instructor/TA cannot resolve the bug right away, they will instead provide you with a code review: they will look through your entire code and point out aspects that need to be improved or changed, and which could be the source of your bug.

While we realize that it can feel like we’re not answering your question, the code review will help improve your code, which may have an impact on you score on the assignment. It may also resolve your bug but, even if it doesn’t, it will generally make it easier for us to debug your code if you ask about it on Ed Discussion.