How to Teach CSE Courses Efficiently at an IIT

There are six major components of teaching, particularly at undergraduate level.

1. Lectures
2. Quizzes
3. Lab Exercises
4. Homework Assignments
5. Tutorials
6. Major/Minor Exam

Lectures (Around 40)

You should prepare slides a week in advance and upload on your website for students. Reserve at least two hours before the lecture to make a final rehearsal.

Quizzes (Around 6 are Good)

Make a big collection of interesting problems while preparing the lectures itself. The problems can be used to make tutorial, quiz, and discussions in the class. Do not entertain questions during the quiz, let the students make appropriate assumptions.

 Lab Exercises (Around 6 are good)

It would be a good idea to prepare complete lab exercise at least 3 days in advance and give to the TA for solving the lab exercise who is responsible to conduct the lab. The lab exercise should be targeted towards medium level students, with optional (minimal marks) exercise for top students.

Homework Assignment (4 to 6)

Again, the homework assignment should cover the breadth. The assignment should be designed in a such a way so that it can be evaluated with minimal subjective assessment. For example, automatically running a set of test cases. Note that in this case you need to design the assignment with clearly defined input/output formats. Having said that, a VIVA is also mandatory to curb plagiarism. VIVA can be quick (upto 10 minutes) where the student explains the solutions and code.

Tutorial(once a week)

Prepare a week in advance and make sure to discuss the tutorial with TA before the tutorial session.

Major/Minor Exam

Again, make the paper at least a week in advance and solve it by yourself after a gap of at-least 3 days. This will expose ambiguities in the questions. Do not entertain questions during the exam, let the students make appropriate assumptions. An open ended question needs more time. You may want to limit the number os such questions. 

Should I include paper organization in the Introduction?

Well, if your paper organization reads like an abstract story, you should include it; otherwise not. If you are willing to spend that extra bit of time to make your paper organization meaningful, then only include it in the paper. Otherwise it is just waste of very precious real estate.

Do Not Include

Related works are discussed in section II. In section III we propose a model for privacy measurement. A prototype implementation is described in section IV. Experiments and results are detailed in section V. We summarize the paper in section VI.

Include

The paper begins by enumerating existing privacy models in Section II. It is found that the previous models do not consider implicit channels of privacy loss. Consequently, a privacy model is proposed in Section III that considers both implicit and explicit channels. In order to validate the proposed privacy model, we implemented a prototype system that is described in Section IV. We compared the proposed model with three state-of-the-art models in Section V. The experiments lead us to interesting findings which are listed in Section VI. 

Why do researcher at MIT do better than CIT (Common Institute of Technology)?

I recently had a conversion with a researcher from MIT. To unravel the mystery of why do people generally do better at MIT in comparison to the researchers at CIT, I asked him few questions:

• Are there better equipments?
• He said "No".
• Are people super duper genius there?
• He said "No".
• Does university force you to work extremely hard?
• He sain "No".
• Any voodoo?   
• He said "No".

Big question: When resources are equivalent, people are similar, then WHY???

He said "We work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, consistently, with high efficiency. Since everyone around us has been doing this since long time, we also feel like doing it. Thats it."

Conclusion

If you can keep yourself internally motivated to work for 40 hours  a week, with CONSISTENCY, clear focus and high EFFICIENCY, you won't do different from any other prestigious institute.

I could only reach around 3.5 hours a day so far. But I am on it, hope to reach 8 hours mark soon!  

When to use the article "the"?

Most nouns in English are preceded by an article. While use of a and an is easier, use of the article "the" is tricky.

Below is the list of steps which work for most cases:

1. Find the noun. It might have preceding modifiers.
2. Can it be "any" instance of that noun? If yes, use "a/an", else, use "the".

Examples

• I bough a car. The car is of red color. [In the second sentence, it cannot be any car but the car I bought.]
• This is the same model I had before. [Noun = model. It cannot be any model, but the one I had before, so "the".]
• The tax rebate only applies to the members of the same family. [It is a special tax rebate, they cannot be any members, it cannot be any family] 

Bullets and Punctuations: Where to use capitals? When to end with a periods?

• Use capitals when the bullet is a sentence or title.
• Start each work with capital if its a title, no period.
• Have period when it is a sentence.
• Start with a small letter and have period only if the bullet completes the list introductory sentence.
• With others, no capital, no period.