Regarding TA’s teaching classes at Stanford, I have 3 degrees from Stanford. I have never heard of being the primary lecturer for any class. However, TAs still do have teaching responsibilities.
Stanford’s typical model for the popular intro classes is to have all students enrolled in the course to be grouped into a single lecture class, which may be a class of hundreds. The most popular lecture classes can approach 1000 students. A well known professor in this field teaches the lecture classes. At some point after the lecture, the students attend much smaller sections, often with 10 or fewer students. These smaller sections gives students the opportunity to ask questions and get more personalized attention, which wouldn’t be possible in the large lectures. TAs teach/lead the section. Professors teach/lead the lecture.
Lab classes are a special case. If lab classes have a lecture component, the professor leads the lecture, and TA’s generally lead the lab. I’ve never heard of TAs giving the lecture component of a lab class, but the TAs do often give instructions about the lab assignments and assist students throughout the lab class. In smaller majors, students see the same TAs in many classes, so they get to know them very well, often better than their professors.
It’s been my experience that many publics have a different model. For example, some of the math intro classes I took at SUNYA were much smaller than the large classes at Stanford. SUNYA was able to make some of the high enrollment intro math/science class sizes much smaller by splitting the course up in to several different lectures that were often led by math PhD students, rather than professors. Rather than have smaller sections, a first year intro math class might have no sections and smaller classes, some of which were taught by PhD students. My anecdotal experience was that the PhD students often did a better job at teaching the intro math classes than the experienced professors… perhaps because of less burnout.
Curious how many pages this thread can grow to saying kids are different, schools are different, family finances are different. You need to find what works for you/your kid and broad generalizations are rarely helpful.
Not only will this thread possibly continue to grow, there will be a number of other threads started with essentially the same question or some variant of it (and those threads will go on for pages as well). “It depends” are words with which this site struggles.
“Examples off the top of my head - Vandy, CMU, Stanford.”
Two daughters at Vanderbilt just told me they’ve had zero TAs teach or lecture a single class. My senior says no classes are taught by TAs that she’s ever heard of.
@bloomfield88 There is nothing wrong with TAs teaching. There are good and bad TAs just as there are good and bad tenured professors. We are just correcting the repeated misstatements by certain posters that only state and non-elite schools use TAs to teach undergrads. It simply isn’t true even if often repeated.
@itsgettingreal21 "bloomfield88 There is nothing wrong with TAs teaching. There are good and bad TAs just as there are good and bad tenured professors. "
Oh, ok, I will definitely make them go back and take that frosh calc class then. Thank you for clarifying. Whether a good or bad TA, a TA taught class will be a new experience for them at Vanderbilt.
Some students and parents may think such practices are material, even though not everyone would agree. More information and more transparency is generally a good thing regardless.
Many institutions likely will have little interest in being transparent on that issue. They understand its a sensitive issue for many (and as noted, the “con” with respect to public schools is often “classes taught by TAs” with the “pro” of private schools being “no classes taught by TAs” even though as noted its not the case at all privates). And descriptions of the use of TAs can be in vague terms so as not to be too transparent on the subject.
And people sharing their experiences won’t provide anything of a statistically relevant sample.
Regarding highest % of TAs teaching undergrad classes, below are the top 10 according to USNews:
Purdue (26%)
University of South Florida (25%)
University of Georgia (24)
University of Iowa (20%)
UNC-Chapel Hill (20%)
University of Hawaii (18%)
UNiversity of Illinois (UIUC) (18%)
Florida State University (18%)
University of Arkansas (18%)
University of Kansas
In addition, regarding overcrowding and class sizes, D’s close friend is a freshman at UC Berkeley. She showed me a video of the full lecture hall for her computer science class of 1,550 students. It looked like a group of people attending a rock concert!
There are a wide variety of percentages between >0% and 100%. Rather than whether the number of classes taught by TAs is exactly 0 vs >0, I think the far more relevant consideration is the rate of classes taught by TAs and whether rate that impacts class quality.
The chance of TAs teaching classes is far from impossible to review. You can look up the specific instructor status of each class at many colleges prior to enrolling, including Stanford. One might look up the specific classes/fields that interest them and review both class size and instructor status. Looking up various undergrad classes offered this quarter at Stanford, I see a wide variety of instructor statuses, including many with unique backgrounds who are not traditional professors. However, I have yet to see or hear of any specific undergrad lecture classes with a TA as the primary instructor. The number may very well be >0, but I expect the rate is quite low, and there is a good reason for the TAs teaching in the rare cases where this may occur.
In the USNWR survey, some colleges listed noteworthy rates of TAs being the primary instructor. For example, Purdue said 26% of their undergrad classes had a TA as the primary instructor, UNC:CH said 20%, UIUC said 19%, etc. I’m not especially familiar with any of these colleges, but I suspect they use a smaller intro class model like the summary in my earlier post. Rather than have a large intro math/science class with hundreds taught by a professor, they might have smaller and more personalized freshman intro classes taught by TAs.
All of my D’s classes at her school noted above were taught by a professor, with the exception of one. Her Spanish class, with 25 students, was taught by a TA who was almost finished with her degree. If 20% of classes were taught by a TA as the primary instructor, she wasn’t feeling it.
All of her science classes were taught by professors. The larger intro classes had a TA present, but he/she was not the primary instructor. He/she was there to assist, and to run the smaller sections that met weekly (25 students).
During my D’s senior year she was sitting in her science class waiting for the professor, who ended up not coming due to a sudden emergency. The TA immediately stood up and taught the class, and my D said he did a great job.
Now I need to research which classes were taught by TAs…?
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