Needy students

I've tended to make myself pretty available to the students in my classes for extra help outside class. I really do want the students to learn, and it is also a good way to boost teaching evaluation scores without compromising grading standards. It seems to me that 5-10% of the students take 80-90% of my out of class time. I am beginning to wonder if I am doing some of these students a disservice by not forcing them to learn how to access resources other than their professors for help.

I really think that part of what students go to University for is to learn how to learn things quickly. I've noticed that many of my timesink students do not belong to study groups and tend to study and work alone almost all the time. It is very difficult to get a BS or BSE in my field without learning how to work in groups. There is no way I would have been able to get much out of my senior level labs and problem sets without working the material through with my classmates. I imagine other STEM fields are similar. In the job world, pretty much everyone works in teams, so they may as well learn how to now. So now I am starting to wonder if I am falling into the academic equivalent of a helicopter parent for some of my students.

Maybe next time, I should make myself more of a last resort than a first place to go for questions via email.