Special 517

Special Offering of CSC 517: The Issues

The proposal is to offer a special section of CSC 517 to two or three students holding teaching assistantships, while I am on sabbatical. The primary motivation is to provide more options for finding a qualified TA in 2009, though there are other advantages.

A DE course?

Objection: Since the students would view prerecorded lectures from 2007, it is essentially a DE course.

Answer: Since I would meet with the students for an hour a week, they would actually have more contact with me than if they were attending lectures in a classroom.

A closed course?

Objection: Since only TAs would be enrolled, it establishes the precedent of offering courses only to a select group of students.

Answer: CSC 630, CSC 695, CSC 699, CSC 890, CSC 895, or any departmental-approval required course is already a closed course. As to being a precedent for anything else, that is unlikely; see below.

Rebuttal: David Thuente made a point about the dissimilarity of this offering to 600- and 800-level courses, which I do not recall.

A precedent for abuse?

Objection: If this were allowed, the department might have to deal with many proposals to offer courses for two or three students.

Answer: Such proposals would likely be rare to nonexistent. The Registrar, Louis Hunt, is not aware, offhand, of any similar offering in any department at any time in the past. If the proposal is to offer a new course for two or three students, it would have to be approved by the appropriate departmental/college committees, as other courses are. Also, the lecture media files would have to be available, which would preclude all new courses. If it is a section of an existing course, why would anyone want to offer a tiny section as an overload when they could get teaching credit for taking a normal-sized section? The only motivation I can anticipate is a faculty member on leave who wants to provide continuity to his teaching and research program.

Moreover, it is not argued that offering such a course for continuity of someone's teaching/research program is an abuse. It is just argued that it could be a precedent for some abuse. But, what abusive motivation might there be? Arguing that something should not be done now because it might possibly be a precedent for abuse later, when we don't have any idea what that abuse might be, is sheer speculation, and not a very strong reason to deny this request.

Finally, if a request were made to offer a course for reason that is an abuse of our educational mission, that request could and should be turned down because it was abusive.

An unfair advantage in acquiring Ph.D. students and/or TAs?

Objection: Faculty often have to be assigned TAs who have not taken their course. This is inevitable because we have 23 entering TAs this year. By offering a course to a couple of TAs, it is argued, I would be obtaining an unfair advantage over other faculty. Furthermore, TAs are Ph.D. students, so this gives me a way to work with Ph.D. students that is not available to other faculty.

Answer: I don't think it's right to look at this in terms of "advantage." Other faculty members have Ph.D. students with TAs who can TA their course; I don't. Other faculty have multiple Ph.D. students; I currently don't. I have 0 CSC Ph.D. students. (I do have one ECE Ph.D. student, who is on leave.) This is an area where I sorely need to catch up. It is good to provide opportunities for catching up.

The challenge of finding a qualified TA

Many faculty have been assigned TAs who have not taken their courses. This is a continuing problem for me. Without naming names, I have talked to one other unhappy faculty member, who tells me that others are unhappy too. For me, the situation may be worse than most. The combination of ECE and DE students in my courses means that CSC Ph.D. students are a tiny minority in my classes, more so than in other CSC grad courses. Both in Spring and Fall 2007, I asked one of my RAs to help out the TA because the TA did not know the material. This is not a good situation for anyone. I know how worried I have become that my TA will not know the course material. I can only imagine how anxious TAs must be about being assigned to subjects they have never learned.

As far as I know, the current system for awarding TAs does not consider the applicant's qualifications for being a TA. TAs are offered to the students who are most promising from a research perspective. Once here, the TA's performance is not assessed in any way. Faculty are not asked to rate their TA at the end of the semester (or at any other time). Nor are the students. The departmental course evaluation used to have questions about the TA, but the university-wide course evaluation in use since Fall 2006 has none. So we have a system where TAs get their jobs independent of their qualifications for them, and keep their jobs independent of their performance. This is nothing short of scandalous! As regards undergrad courses, it would be a major PR problem if the media ever got wind of this.