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In the intro courses, this is correct, and the UTA system works exceptionally well for those courses. It’s not a perfect system, but there aren’t complaints about the TA system for those courses.</p>
<p>For upper level courses (and even intermediate courses), it tends to be different, though - developing assignments should be the professor’s task, not the TAs’, and under no circumstances should an undergrad be grading a PhD candidate’s work. The university’s UTA standards pretty much limit them to running a section and grading multiple choice questions. The CS department exceeds this substantially (subjective grading, some TAs give lectures, developing assignments) and pays less than other departments, admittedly with the blessing of the university. I too served as an undergrad TA for 4 semesters (a head TA for 2 of those), and I really found there to be a huge difference between lower level and upper level courses.</p>
<p>The difference, of course, is that in most classes, assignments aren’t graded automatically, and so an army of graders is needed, and (under the CS15 model, at least) a massive amount of office hours are needed. The department has a small grad program, so grad TAs won’t work under this model.</p>
<p>Most other departments limit the undergrad TA interaction - there’s nothing wrong with having an undergrad who’s done well in a class grade multiple choice questions, or even leading a (scripted) review session a week, and in some cases, due to Brown’s unique way of teaching some courses, undergrads who have taken a class will make better TAs for it than graduate students who have taken a very different class. It’s just a few situations in which I find it frustrating (and even then, the students tend to look up to most of the TAs in the CS department).</p>