How to ask for help
We will use Ed Discussion for general questions as well as your specific questions about grades.
Aside from all the standard UBC policies and guidelines, here are some additional points about how you’re expected to use these platforms.
Ed-specific Q&A guidelines
When you post questions on Ed:
- Do not post offensive or disrespectful content.
- Do a quick search to make sure your question hasn’t already been answered.
- you can filter by tags like
hw1 or do a keyword search
- Ask for help after an appropriate amount of thought and effort.
- Read all the instructions before asking for help. Don’t ask questions whose answers are on the course website or homework instructions or on the first page of a Google search. These questions take time away from other instructional activities.
- Don’t ask for help after being stuck for only 10 seconds. Make a reasonable effort to solve your problem.
- On the other hand, don’t wait until after 5 hours of painful debugging before asking a question. At some point, this just becomes time wasted. This can be exceptionally frustrating if it turns out there was a bug in the assignment (it happens!).
- As a very rough general guideline, try to work on something for 20-30 minutes and then ask for help.
- Avoid including answers or partial answers in your question/post.
- If you have a code problem, include as much relevant information as possible like:
- your version of Python and relevant libraries
- your operating system
- the command you used to execute the program
- the entire error message
- Try to make the error reproducible and understandable
- Include the exact command you used to run the code.
- Include the entire error traceback, or at the very least the part showing the line number and error message.
- If you post a question and then figure out the answer yourself, please do not delete the question. It’s still useful. Ideally, you’d post the answer to your own question for others to benefit.
- When using equations, write them in LaTeX syntax and surround them with two dollar-signs. For example
$$2^x$$ will render nicely in Ed.
General questions
For general questions, use Ed and post to the entire class so that other students benefit from the discussion.
Specific questions
- For questions involving your specific implementation of a homework question either use tutorials or office hours or post on Ed to the instructors only. Before posting your specific question, think about whether other people in the class are likely to benefit from your question or not. If yes, formulate your specific question as a general question and post it to the entire class.
- Include a link to the file you want us to review, and a brief explanation.
- If you want to be extra fancy, you can include a link to the specific line by appending a code like
#L123 to the end of the URL (this would link to line 123). You can also link to a range of lines, like #L9-L17 to highlight lines 9-17. See, for example, this link.
- For general questions about your grade, check Ed to see if we posted a list of who graded which questions. If so, you can just send a message on piazza to the person from the teaching team who graded it. If you don’t get a timely response (a couple days), then send it to all instructors, which you can do by typing instructors in the post to field. Clearly mention the name of the assignment, your name and student number, and explain your concern. If you wish to challenge a grade, please refer to this page.