Tutoring Audit
At UTSA, one of my more recent projects has been to look into the tutoring our graduate students offer to undergraduates. By requirement, each Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) must offer two designated office hours each week, and to facilitate this in years past there has been a schedule from 8am-7pm from Monday to Friday that each of them sign up for two hours for.
When I took over the administration of this, I asked myself how this can be improved in the following ways;
Is the current system effective?
Do undergraduate students actually attend these tutoring hours?
Is there a particular focus of tutoring that should be addressed?
What, if any, improvements can be made?
The Process
I created sign-in sheets at the beginning of the Spring 2025 Semester, so that students attended tutoring hours can sign-in and mark their attendance. At the end of each week, I would input the sign-in data into a master spreadsheet, to track:
Number of students attending
Times that students attend
What courses/subjects students need tutoring in
How long students need tutoring for
This proved to be immediately helpful. Below is a graph displaying the number of students attending tutoring sessions each week.
After the first week of collecting data, it became immediately clear that students were not aware of the existence of these tutoring hours. Following a major promotional push, we saw a huge uptake, with attendance rising each week until the build up to Spring Break.
Spring Break also saw zero students attend - yet our GTAs were still forced to hold their office hours. This was a huge concern, and again highlighted that tutoring hours were not as effective as they could be.
Finally, we saw an uptake of attendance in the lead up to Final exams, yet during the actual week of finals there was no requirement for GTAs to hold office hours.
Another element of data recorded was the time that students signed-in and signed-out of their tutoring session. This enabled us to visualize when peak and quiet times were, as shown by the below graph:
To summarize these findings, I further cleaned the data to highlight this discrepancy in times that students visited below
These visualizations make it abundantly clear how ineffective the current tutoring system was. We currently had one GTA present for tutoring at each two hour timeslot throughout the week, and as a result some GTAs would see and tutor 10 times more students than others. Recording this data led to valuable insights to recommend changes.
Finally, we asked students signing-in to specify which subject they required tutoring in. This produced the below results
This data enabled my supervisors to better understand what subjects students were struggling with and require subsequent tutoring in.
Separate to tutoring, I also took the initiative to look into how we were allocating labs to our GTAs. It became clear to me that some GTAs were far more overworked than others. I looked into the procedure of lab allocation, and discovered that each GTA was given three lower-division or two upper-division labs to teach as standard.
However, lower-division labs have far more students than upper-division, leading to starkly contrasting numbers of students that each GTA taught, and therefore marked reports for (and thus, increased hours of work).
To highlight this, I collated the data to count the number of students within each lab, average the number for each course and GTA and created the following visual:
To further highlight the issue, I took three GTAs and provided a visual to display the discrepancy between number of students in their labs:
The GTA on the left (Gen Chem II) taught 72 students, whilst the GTA on the right (Biochemistry II) taught just 21. Both GTAs were hired and paid to work the same number of hours, a clear issue. The middle, yellow bar represent an MS student that taught 57 students - and midway through the semester quit due to the high workload.
Conclusion of Analysis
As a direct result of my data analysis, and providing these visualizations to my supervisors, the following changes will be made in future semesters based on the data-driven insights obtained:
Tutoring:
Changes are to be made to the scheduling of office hours: instead of one GTA per hour every hour all week from 8am-7pm, the hours would be amended to 10am-5pm.
Furthermore, two or more GTAs would be present for the busy lunch-time slots, to help tutor more students during the peak hours.
Each GTA would be provided with the materials for the three core course; Gen Chem, Organic Chem and Basic Chem. The data revealed that 89% of students required teaching in one of these courses, whilst less than half of the GTAs actually taught them.
Promotion of tutoring should be sustained throughout the semester, so that increased and maintained levels of students attend them.
Lab Allocation:
The final change to this is still pending, however my recommendation based on the data was that labs should not be allocated as they currently are and instead be calculated by numbers of students within them rather than the current standard, ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach that leads to unhealthy and unbalanced workloads.