Using Survival Analysis to Model Students' Patience in Online Office Hour Queues

Zhikai Gao, Adam M. Gaweda, Collin F. Lynch, Sarah Heckman, Damilola Babalola, Gabriel Silva de Oliveira

Abstract: Promptly and properly addressing students' help requests during office hours is a critical challenge for large CS courses. With a large number of help requests, the queue gets longer and students have to endure long wait times. To address this problem, we try to quantify students' patience in the queue through survival analysis. Our results show that half of the students are willing to stay in the queue after waiting for 142.5 minutes. Moreover, we find that female students, morning requests, returning students, and requests about test failures are more likely to stay in the queue for a longer time.