As a teaching assistant, I do not care what type of paper you use as long as you use plenty of it.

Too many students try to cram an entire problem set onto one sheet of paper. I hate it. It is hard for me to grade and hard for you to go back and revise later. I like one step of the problem per line. If you’re neat, I am fine with having two columns of work, but most people are not that neat. If you work straight down the page I don’t have to deal with hunting around for your answers or for the corner of the page where you did the important step.

As a note, I don’t care how you do your scratch work. You shouldn’t be turning in all your scratch to me (except, of course on exams when you don’t have time to be messing around with rewriting). Homework should be written solutions, presented in a way that a classmate could easily follow.

I’m mean and tell my students if I can’t read it, it is wrong. Same goes for if I can’t actually find your answer. Most people heed the warning and we have no problems, but there are one or two chronic offenders every term who lose a few points to the chaos. (I do try pretty hard to find their answers and follow their work. It’s pretty easy to get derailed on these problems so I try to find the point where things went south and mark it, but sometimes it’s a lost cause.)So you’d better use a college ruled spiral notebook.