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<p>marite, I’m glad your S had this experience. This is how the TA system is supposed to work, but in reality, it does not always work this way. Imagine a TA with a limited English vocabulary (but who is definitely a brilliant chemist) teaching a lab section of 30 students. This TA is stuck between a rock and a hard place: the prof who holds lectures for the lab course wants him to have office hours, the profs who teach graduate courses want him to study for the next series of quizes, the graduate research advisor wants him to run a few experiments and start writing the scientific paradigm-shifting paper to be submitted to Nature… There are only 24 hours in a day, and something needs to be sacrificed in order to get the other stuff done…</p>