Prof. Kristin Stephens-Martinez

I became an Associate Professor of the Practice in January 2024. This means academic year (AY) 24–25 was the first time I had to negotiate the service requests and demands of an associate professor. Now that the academic year is over and I spent the last semester digesting the repercussions of those negotiations, I thought I’d write a blog post about it. My hope is that this blog post can serve as a case study on how workload changes when you become an associate. [ Also posted on Medium. ] First, my experience may not be yours, but I think sharing it would be useful to others. It gives you, my reader, a visceral sense of what could happen. Moreover, this blog post is a way for me to better process what happened. It also provides future me with a snapshot of what that first year was like and helps me better imagine the trade-offs and repercussions of my decisions. So this blog post is unlikely to be for everyone, dear reader. But for some of you, let me provide a bit more of a vivid vis...

A shared inbox was a tool I started using when I was the hybrid chair of the SIGCSE Technical Symposium. It was extremely useful then, and I have since incorporated it into my teaching processes. So, this blog post covers why I use a shared inbox, considerations when using one, and two case studies of how those considerations played out. [ Also posted on medium. ] Why use a shared inbox? In short, efficiency! If more than one person in a group can respond to an email, the speed of response goes up while no one repeats work. I’ve lost count of how often I’ve seen multiple people get an email and respond simultaneously. Or I’ve been that person who started writing and thankfully didn’t send it before the other person hit send! But there are more efficiency gains than just that! There’s clarity on the context, on who is responsible, and in the email responses themselves. If the entire email thread is in the shared inbox, everyone has access to that context, and no one has to find an...

 When it comes to anyone’s advice on how to run your own course, your “mileage may vary.” So, I thought it would be interesting to revisit my series on how I organize my teaching staff in my 200+ student class . The first post of that series is my most viewed post on Medium. I published that series during the second half of 2020, and times have changed since then (**cough** pandemic **cough**). In addition, I’ve moved on from that introductory computer science (CS1), and I primarily teach an elective data science (DS) course, which has a high variability in enrollment. In this post, I revisit that series from the perspective of what I still do versus do not between my CS1 and DS courses. [ Also posted on medium. ] Current Course’s Context Before I start my comparison, I need to go over how the context is different since it influenced many of the differences between the two courses. My DS class has a semester-long project and no labs/discussions. The class also uses Python, whi...

I consistently teach over 200 students at a time. Therefore, I heavily rely on autograders and teaching assistants (TAs) to grade everything. I use and love Gradescope. But, like all interfaces, Gradescope is limited in the affordances of how to use it. So I thought I’d write a blog post on the logistics side of how I use Gradescope to manage my grading. This post will cover a mix of small and big effort things I do to handle the logistics of grading homeworks and exams. [Also posted on  medium .] The “Prof. Double Check” rubric For those unfamiliar with Gradescope, it enables hand grading via rubric items that TAs can check off to mark student work. Rubrics help make grading more consistent, and Gradescope automatically handles live rubric updates and multiple TAs grading the same problem. In turn, Gradescope shows summary statistics on these rubrics and allows filtering by a rubric. I take advantage of this feature by adding at the bottom a rubric called “Prof. Double Check,...