For patrons who are complete novices in any supported area of computing, ITS offers classes and can suggest tutorials and other sources of beginning information. Many areas of computing have extensive help documents on the Web through http://www.usc.edu/its/ as well.

Except for the regularly scheduled workshops (noted above), ITS Consultants cannot teach individuals entire software packages. The mission of the Consulting group is to provide help solving specific problems encountered while using supported software or machines. ITS Consultants are not expected to help people write programs and will not help individuals do their homework assignments, except in situations where specific problems arise with supported hardware or software. Examples of such "specific problems" include machines going down, error messages that are not explained (or vaguely explained) in manuals, virus problems, program statements that don't seem to do what they're supposed to do, and so forth.

It is the responsibility of the faculty of the university to teach students how to decide what statistical procedures are appropriate for their data, how to interpret output, and other matters such as research design and general quantitative or qualitative data processing. Expertise in these areas can not be expected from ITS consultants, and any discussion of these issues, when and if time or occasion permits, must be considered as unofficial 'context' conversation.

As a "rule of thumb", whenever possible, patrons seeking help from ITS Consultants should already have a program written (however imperfect), should be able to tell the Consultant what manuals or other documentation they've consulted, or should have a description of their attempts to solve the problem they're having.