[ehairston]

Completely agree. CS departments deserve a ton of credit for having to adjust to insane levels of growth that are unlike any other department.

Also you're spot on about Cal. In fact, I too questioned whether or not it made sense for us to launch there at first, especially given that they have such a topnotch CS program with incredible resources. However when we spoke to 100s of students there before we launched, we quickly learned that the competitive environment still resulted in so many students slipping through the cracks. Moreover, we encourage Edlyft mentors to direct students to existing resources on campus as well. Edlyft should not be a replacement for these existing resources, but instead a supplemental option where students feel they can be a little more vulnerable.

Lastly, our characterization of the climate in schools comes directly from students' experiences and our own. Cal definitely has tons of resources that I only wished I had access to when I was in school. However many schools are still very far from getting there, leading to so much talent being overlooked. Edlyft should not have to exist and we're successful when it no longer needs to.

[aripickar]

I think that the main reason that students want tutors and other resources is because office hours are slammed during projects, event though there are lots of TA's and readers. There are a lot of resources to help students with material in terms of understanding, but there are a lot fewer to help students debug projects, so I think that it's where a lot of the demand is. Unfortunately, I don't see Denero or Hilfinger allowing private debugging help for hire as a solution due to cheating and plagiarism risks. How do you ensure that the tutors are abiding within the honor code, and not helping students cheat?

[ehairston]

Wow! You highlighted exactly what we've heard from sooo many students: OH being slammed during projects as a major pain point.

To avoid helping students cheat, we have all Edlyft mentors agree to an academic honesty policy, go through mentor training, and all are interviewed before they join Edlyft. We've also considered recording sessions as well, but haven't gone that route yet.

But more than that it's been fascinating to watch some of our mentor sessions. What we've seen happen is some students actually prefer to use Edlyft to become an "excellent" CS student and hone their understanding of concepts vs. getting hw done just for the grade. My hypothesis on this is that our mentor sessions are unlike traditional office hours where you may only get 10min of TA attention. So, when students are able to slow down and really grasp concepts, doing hw on their own gets easier.