CIS Tutors' Policies

CIS Tutor Responsibilities
The underlying philosophy of CIS tutors is that our work should not exceed the amount of help that a student would get from an instructor during office hours. Especially, this means that CIS tutors should not do the work for the student, but direct them in how to complete the work. Our service is thought of as an extension, not a replacement, of faculty office hours.

Following is a list of services that CIS tutors' job provide:

1) Show the students how to use software, i.e. Visual Studio, Rational Rose, ...

2) Going over and explaining class notes, power points, examples, textbook problems, etc. posted by the instructor.

3) If made available by the instructor, tutors can go over old exams and explain solutions and how the solutions were derived. If an instructor does not post solutions, tutors will not give them out but only direct students on how to derive a solution.

4) Help with programming assignments.

• Explaining the instructions given by the instructor
• Provide debugging Help (HELPING WITH SYNTAX ERRORS ONLY)

[The overall philosophy here is that CIS tutors should enable the student to get a program to run by themselves, but not to create a correct program for them. Thus: CIS tutors will not be typing code. We will aid the student in finding the locations of syntax errors and instruct students on the correct syntax of a given command. We will explain the need for critical commands and parts of code such as

• the need for an exit condition in a loop to avoid endless loops
• relative and absolute paths to files so that a student can open a file/database correctly.
• explain access problems to methods, i.e. private vs. public Whenever possible, we will try to explain the given problem on a smaller, similar sample problem and not work on the actual assignment. 

Limitation: Logical errors will not be corrected, i.e. incorrect formulae, incorrect sequence of statements, etc.

Reminder: our job is to help student successfully solve a programming problems by themselves, not do the assignment for them.  Please come with a problem that you have already have the code written but not running well. ]

5) Help with analysis and design assignments