<p>It’s also pretty easy to tell when the TA has written up their own solutions or just taken ones from previous years (as far as I know, TAs are never given solutions directly from professors). I’ve had a lot of classes where the solution sets will be made up of different handwritings, have the wrong number in front of the problem, or the TAs will just respond with “Oh, that problem’s not so difficult, you just do X, Y, and Z to solve it,” and when you ask why you’d do those you get that blank stare for a few seconds while they try to figure out a way to shoo you off.</p>
<p>I feel bad for the TAs that actually do all the work themselves, struggling through the really difficult problems, but then when they’re asked for help it’s just on how to do the problem as quickly as possible, not on how to really understand what’s going on. One or two of my friends gave up on being “good” TAs since they felt it just wasn’t worth the work with how they were being treated.</p>