Who Should I Help Next? Simulation of Office Hours Queue Scheduling Strategy in a CS2 Course

Promptly and properly addressing students' help requests during office hours is a critical challenge for large CS courses. With a large amount of help requests, instructors often find themselves facing a long office hours queue and need to decide who to help next. Most instructors typically select the earliest arrival students (FCFS), while some instructors prioritize students who haven't been helped recently to ensure fairness. To better understand and quantify how those different strategies affect the queue and students' experience, we simulated the office hours queue with four different strategies under three different queue loads using the students' problem-solving behaviors as a guide. Our simulation results show that when the queue is relaxed, different strategies make no difference. When the queue is busy or normal, prioritizing students who haven't helped today is the best strategy. Moreover, we also discussed how to develop a strategy based on students' code commit status, and corresponding simulation results indicate those strategies have no impact on the queue.