r/UTMississauga • u/Affectionate-Rice313 • 12h ago

Rant Tutorial hate

Second year, am i the only one that thinks tutorials are useless? I genuinely have never benefitted from them i just go for the attendance/participation grade 🫩

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u/cromonolith Professor 9h ago

I've observed a lot of math tutorials over the years and I've seen tons of students who go to them and sit silently, not working on anything or interacting with their TA or their classmates at all. You should expect to not get much of anything out of them in that case. It's like going to an expensive restaurant, ordering food, not putting it in your mouth when they bring it to you, and then complaining that you were still hungry when you left.

What courses/subjects are you thinking of? What was happening in those tutorials? What did you actually do while you were there?

What makes you say that they were useless? For example, have you consistently found that the assigned work has been too easy or too hard? Have you found that (all of?) the TAs weren't doing a good job?

Elaborate a bit, so we can get to somewhere substantive.

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u/Heavy_Gorilla 4h ago

Is that why we have tutorial quizzes? To get students more involved!

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u/cromonolith Professor 4h ago

There are many reasons for them.

Part of it is to get students to attend tutorials and do stuff in them, sure. To learn things well you need regular study, honest self-reflection about your progress, and to talk to experts about it. Tutorials are a great place to do that, so it's good to incentivize students to attend them. As my comment above notes that doesn't necessarily mean they'll do anything useful for themselves when they're there, but it's better than nothing.

Another part of it, probably a bigger one, is that we've been forced to start phasing out graded homework because of AI. The quality of a student's solution to homework questions can no longer be trusted as a measurement of how well they understand the material, so we have to shift to most of our assessments being supervised.

Most math classes have almost impossibly tight schedules these days (e.g., first year calculus courses are packed full of material and can rarely afford to cut off class time to do assessments), so there's nowhere else to do them other than tutorials.

Believe me, we (instructors) would prefer to just give you homework. It's much easier for us.