“I’m not sure that his official title is TA.”
Students can and do “assist” profs at HYP, but they are NOT official’ TA’s, who grade papers, run labs, etc, etc.
LAC’s, where there are NO grad students to TA, are a different matter.
@ClarinetDad16, in no way is it different from what my daughter did at her LAC. My younger one did not have an undergrad teacher at Harvard in any of her intro sections but she did have undergrads to whom she could turn for help if she wanted.
@3girls3cats - Harvard has undergrads utilized to teach lectures.
- Lectures? * Which ones?
If that’s true, it’s so rare that not a single person my daughter knows this year has experienced it. These are freshmen, all enrolled in at least one intro class.
This is definitely extremely rare. If you’re referring to the pictured undergraduate giving a portion of the CS50 lecture, you have to realize that this is an extremely special case. The CS50 instructor (David Malan) is not actually a Harvard computer science professor. He got his start as a lecturer who was absolutely devoted to teaching beginning computer science. He is a very dedicated and dynamic teacher, and Harvard eventually created a special “professorship in teaching” for him (from what I understand, Malan’s passion is teaching, not research). I would be pretty confident that if Malan allowed an undergraduate to give a portion of a lecture then there was (1) a very good pedagogical reason (2) as much preparation as for an Apollo moonshot. Malan is that dedicated.
I do believe that some undergrads at Harvard teach discussion sections for a handful of courses. My personal opinion is that this is far from ideal.
Regardless of whether a TA is an undergraduate or a graduate student, I will say this … I’d bet that the average parent here would be completely shocked at how little training TAs are given before being asked to lead a discussion section, whether at Harvard or at most other schools (there are some exceptions, such as for very advanced graduate students who are teaching small, manpower intensive classes like writing seminars for freshmen or foreign language instruction where the TA is for all intents and purposes almost running the entire class.) (LAC’s are of course different than research universities.)
Back in the day, my training as a graduate student TA amounted to “Here’s the syllabus. You’ve all been to college and seen discussion sections before. Class starts tomorrow.” Just being a native English speaker who diligently tried to be a good TA was enough to put me in the top quintile. I gather things have only improved a teeny-tiny bit. Of course, professors aren’t given any formal training in teaching either unless you count their experience as a TA or a graduate student 
As a grad student at an Ivy I had some great grad student TA’s and some not great TA’s, just like I had some great professors and some not so great professors. The difference in my mind is that when the TA’s were bad they were not just weak but terrible-they hadn’t read the material we were discussing or had severe language issues. This latter was a real issue when I was working at this same Ivy and in charge of matching grad students with TA assignments for one of the science departments. TA’ing was part of their basic funding package so at times we had to give new foreign students TA jobs for which they were not well prepared. There were times when we removed TA’s due to multiple complaints-mostly that the students couldn’t understand the TA and they didn’t seem to understand the students. The problem was that by the time we’d given the TA a chance to take advantage of support and they had still shown themselves not able to do the work and we’d removed them from the job, most if not the entire semester had passed. I always felt bad for the students in those classes. My experience was all with TA’s leading discussion sessions, labs and help sessions. I didn’t know of TA’s teaching classes in my departments, although I can’t say it didn’t happen elsewhere in the university.
When I was a TA at my LAC I did not do anything approximating teaching. All of my work was in support of the professor’s research and teaching-tracking down books and periodicals at the library, doing minor research jobs, clerical work, but no student contact. The TA’s at my kids’ LAC offer extra help but in addition to the prof’s regular office hours. They don’t teach or run discussion sections. I can’t speak for how things are/were at other LACs.
Adding-In response to al2simon’s post, my experience was at Harvard, and I’ll echo what he says about training. TA’s could arrive in Cambridge on Friday and be teaching Monday morning. The average grad student in my department took 5-6 years to graduate, sometimes more, so by year 4 or 5 they were pretty seasoned, but in the beginning the profs cared much more about the student’s research and how it fit into what they were doing in their lab, so for most of them the student’s ability to teach was a distant secondary factor in admissions.
So, to summarize the last 525 posts: anything can be a deal breaker if you let it…even coed bathrooms.
In the end, probably best to pick the best overall choice based on that elusive ‘fit’, which in turn is based mostly on academics (interests/offerings/strengths), campus feel (location/size/safety/students/activities), and cost. Sure there are other factors…but ‘deal breakers’? Not for most. And certainly not coed bathrooms.
Well said @CDK.
I just like to know that as a guy I have the freedom to stand up and do my business and not think about who or what gender is next to me. Call me old fashioned but sometimes a guy just wants to be a guy without a girl around to know about it. Just call me “Old School.”
@3girls3cats I understand your daughter and her friends have not heard of it.
If I am cold today…
Here is one example that was listed in the article:
http://statistics.fas.harvard.edu/pages/tf-job-description
If every class at Harvard was taught by a TA, there would still be 10 applicants for every spot. If Yale started requiring chapel every day, they’d still be people who’d want to go. Stanford could make every bathroom wide open and many would line up to go there. Guns allowed at MIT? Not a problem for some.
If a school has one of your deal breakers but has 10 other things you really want, are you willing to deal with the deal breaker? If so, it was not really a deal breaker.
I do think that most people won’t even apply (or look at) schools that have qualities or rules that are outside their comfort zone so it is never an issue of turning down Georgetown because of the birth control policy or CU because someone might smoke pot on campus (against the rules). There are so many other schools that meet the checklist that it is not worth worrying about the ones that don’t.
Not to beat a dead horse, but no they don’t.
Nowhere there does it say that undergrads teach lectures.Harvard uses undergraduates in a relatively small number of departments to lead sections. Let’s be realistic - Harvard could not support the 800+ undergraduates that take CS50 every year without undergraduate CA’s (and whether having an 800+ course at Harvard is good/bad is beyond the scope of this thread). The lectures, however, are delivered by David Malan, not an undergrad.
Edited to add, I just noticed that @al2simon added even more context to my example.
^^ thank you skieurope!
Prospective CS majors should realize that the increasing popularity of majoring in CS has resulted in enormous growth of introductory CS courses. Examples:
Berkeley CS 61A: >1000 students
Stanford CS 106A: >700 students
Harvard CS 50: >700 students
Harvey Mudd CS 5: ~200 students (yes, at a LAC)
“Harvard could not support the 800+ undergraduates that take CS50 every year without undergraduate CA’s”
Well, actually with that endowment of theirs they certainly could but they choose to follow a different business model.
Don’t forget:
Yale CPSC 100: > 500 students, which is the imported version of Harvard’s CS 50.
@CDK thanks for quite possibly the best post ever on CC:-)
“academics (interests/offerings/strengths), campus feel (location/size/safety/students/activities), and cost.”
My kids like to roll all of the “campus feel” categories up into something they call “the vibe.” I am always trying to get them to break “the vibe” back into specifics. I keep alternating between, “Why do you think that?”, “Can you be more specific?”, and “What did you see or hear that led you to that conclusion?” lol
From the Harvard article:
“Statistics 110 is another course which makes heavy use of undergraduate course assistants to teach non-mandatory sections and supplementary lectures.”
UG assistants are NOT TA’s. They are assistants. There IS a difference.
They do not participate in teaching the mandatory lectures break out sessions,nor are they in charge of running labs.
TA’s work with and for the professors, can grade classes and are given part of the life of a PhD students at U’s.