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Teaching Assistants Competency (Department of Computer Science and Technology)

Future Plan (2026)

Part of the earlier training materials (2023 Autumn, 2024 Spring) were written before LLMs permeated CS education, and are in some ways dated.

From 2024 Autumn onwards, the training program has begun to incorporate topics on human–AI collaboration, the impact of LLMs on assignments, grading and tutoring. We are also actively developing a new course on "Introduction to Computing Education Research".

This site is available in both Chinese and English. To switch languages, use the language switcher in the top-right corner; the Chinese version is at the site root, and the English version lives under /en/. If you have questions about some of the materials, please email lrd25@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn.

Or submit your issues here: https://github.com/THUCSTAC/TAC/issues

Related paper

The TA training program documented on this site is described in our paper: Liu, Runda; Chen, Shengqi; Chen, Jiajie; Niu, Songjie; Ma, Yuchun; Tang, Xiaofeng. Iterative Design of a Teaching Assistant Training Program in Computer Science Using the Agile Method. SIGCSE 2025, 680–686. https://doi.org/10.1145/3641554.3701829

The structure of this site has changed a few times and we hope to show the iterations of our training program.

Here is an introduction of the current structure of this site:

TA's Weekly is an attempt to show "one course, one assignment, one paper" for TAs, which is discontinued after we find it hard to collect public materials which are inspiring for TAs.

Reference contains the third-party materials (URLs to them) we find useful for CS TA trainers.

2023 Autumn and 2024 Spring are separately organized. We are feeling that it is not the best way to organize materials, especially if one session do not differ greatly from the prior semester.

From 2024 Autumn onwards we keep a per-semester structure: an index page that summarizes/reflects on the semester, plus one page for each session (as in 2024 Spring), and we are trying to organize materials by topics. Since then, several sessions have been reused across semesters (e.g. debugging, tutoring, PA design, grading), sometimes with the same slides updated for the new semester.

Syllabus of 2023 Autumn

  1. Student feedback and instructional innovation
  2. Office hour and tutoring
  3. Design of programming assignments
  4. Grading and plagiarism detection

Syllabus of 2024 Spring

  1. Traps and advice for new TAs
  2. Revising programming assignments
  3. Assessment and plagiarism detection
  4. Office hours and tutoring
  5. Innovative design of programming assignments
  6. Tools in TA’s work
  7. Pedagogy for debugging
  8. AI tutors
  9. Analysis of student feedback
  10. K-12 CS education

Syllabus of 2024 Autumn

  1. Traps and advice for new TAs (TA Panel / peer sharing)
  2. Pedagogy for debugging
  3. Office hours and tutoring
  4. Discussion with a professor (Deng Junhui)
  5. Innovative design of programming assignments
  6. CS education and games
  7. K-12 CS education
  8. Sharing by the undergraduate course-evaluation committee
  9. Grading and plagiarism detection

Syllabus of 2025 Spring

  1. Traps and advice for new TAs (peer sharing, online)
  2. Office hours and tutoring
  3. Pedagogy for debugging
  4. CS education and games
  5. K-12 CS and AI education
  6. Innovative design of programming assignments
  7. Collecting and analyzing student feedback
  8. Grading and plagiarism detection

Syllabus of 2025 Autumn

  1. Traps and advice for new TAs (peer sharing)
  2. Teaching debugging (how to teach debugging techniques)

Syllabus of 2026 Spring

  1. Traps and advice for new TAs (new-TA peer sharing)