<p>In my experience, TAs are common in large, lower-division lecture courses. These lower-division courses are introductory and are not rocket science. 
A student receiving feedback from a lady in India or from a TA can benefit if the feedback is appropriate; heck, you do know that a machine scores Scantron tests, right?</p>
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<p>I’m sure he or she says that…but really, reading through it all and checking to see if fair and accurate? Seems completely unrealistic and unlikely. At that rate, it would be easier just to do the grading themselves. </p>
<p>I would also like to add that we shouldn’t just dismiss TAs or graduate students’ grading- or teaching for that matter- as inferior- tenure and quality are not necessarily correlated here. Some of our PhD students are award winning teachers getting higher evaluations that our best full time faculty devoted to teaching. They make fabulous graders! Graduate students ofttimes take grading and teaching extremely seriously, and are closer to the material (remembering how they learned what they did…so they can be more effective at helping students over hurdles). Some of my highest evaluations in my career came when I was a brand new grad student (at the tippy top school I did my PhD at, we PhD students taught our own courses to MBAs and usually got stellar ratings). I made faculty honor roll! Likewise, everyone is familiar with the arrogant, over the hill professor teaching the same outdated material who couldn’t care less about being competent in the classroom.</p>
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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>
<p>Well, I am also in the ‘happy to pay full price for good LAC camp’, where the professor teaches a class of 15 students and grades and discusses absolutely every assignment herself.</p>
<p>You could go to Harvard and get a huge class for intro philosophy, then a discussion section of 50 students led by a TA </p>
<p>[YouTube</a> - Justice: What’s The Right Thing To Do? Episode 01](<a href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdfcR-8hEY]YouTube”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdfcR-8hEY)</p>
<p>In case the youtube link gets deleted - just google for “youtube harvard justice sandel” for the episode “What’s the Right Thing to Do?”</p>
<p>They are paying $12 per paper for this service. For that amount, I should think that English major grad students (or out-of-work English post-grads) would be happy to grade papers for Business classes.</p>
<p>^ I agree with you.</p>
<p>Does anyone know if they are outsourcing the grading of math/science problem sets? I would think any one of those would take at least as long as grading a typical essay. And poor English skills would not be much of a problem.</p>
<p>not the same thing as grading papers, but I was an undergrad grader many moons ago. The Computer Science 101 class was very large and had a staff of around 50 students to support the class. </p>
<p>You could start this job as a sophomore and added grading duties later, I don’t remember if only seniors or if juniors and seniors could grade. I remember we graded together in a classroom and ate hawaiian pizza… </p>
<p>This same staff also worked in the labs helping the kids with the programming assignments and also going over tests, this part we were available for all the q&a in the lab, not the particular class we graded for. I don’t remember how well known it was that we were the graders, but I don’t think it was a secret. I think we also proctored the exams. </p>
<p>I don’t remember if upper division classes used undergrads also but although they were lectures they weren’t as huge as this one class. This class and every lecture I remember except one was taught by a professor.</p>
<p>I think that outsourcing the grading of essays is better than not getting any detailed feedback. Throughout grade and high school, I was very disappointed with the lack of detailed commentary on D’s regular ed essays. Typical markups would be spelling errors and “Good Job” at the top. Senior year she took “college prep” English classes and finally got some detailed feedback. I’d be happier if the previous teachers had ‘outsourced’ more thorough grading of her essays. In the end, I felt that I had to do a lot of criticism so she’d learn. Not a great system, IMO, as there are many uneducated and non-native English speakers around here and they can’t be expected to provide guidance.</p>
<p>As for college, she’s gotten very detailed, thoughtful markups of her essays so far, by professors, at the Community College. Very pleased so far.</p>
<p>Sorghum:</p>
<p>Sections at Harvard used to be capped at 18, they’ve gotten slightly bigger (around 20) since the financial crisis. 50 students per section? Those 50 students would be divided up into 3 sections! S1 was at a LAC where the class had 41 students and no opportunity for discussion, given these numbers. A friend of mine who teaches at another LAC had to adjust to the fact that, having been a TF at Harvard and led 18-student sections, he was in sole charge of a class of 55.</p>
<p>$12 per paper? I agree with post #45!</p>
<p>Treetopleaf:</p>
<p>Grading is probably the easy part. Even on psets, feedback is very important. Students need to know where they went wrong, whether the error was one of computation or approach.
My S got very good evals because he gave good feedback.</p>
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Because they ask?</p>
<p>Many on this forum seem to believe both of the following:
- having famous professors is not as important as having professors who teach small classes
- professors are always superior to TAs</p>
<p>Do these two premises seem somewhat hypocritical to anyone else?</p>
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<p>No. Sign me up for both</p>
<p>I think Michael Sandel should turn away the 780 undergraduates who flock to his class every year and only admit 20. It might spark a riot, but, the 20 undergraduates in his class would have both a famous prof and a small class.
Jonathan Spence at Yale should have similarly limited enrollment in his Chinese history class to 20, instead of letting 400-600 students take it. The rest could always read his books, right? Thing is, our Yale tour guide absolutely raved about that class and she was not an East Asian Studies major.</p>
<p>Plus guys like Jonathan Spence attract very bright graduate students who become the TAs. I’m sure it’s an excellent course all the way around.</p>