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.

Summary

This offering of CSC 517 would be more than a DE course, because of my weekly meetings with the students. It's not an unfair advantage for me, because it brings me closer to doing my fair share in working with Ph.D. students and advancing the research agenda of the department. This special offering is not objectionable in itself. It should not be denied over vague concerns about it being a bad precedent for some unspecified abuse that has never occurred in the past.

There are real benefits to this proposal. Not only would it help provide a qualified TA for a fairly large graduate course, and therefore benefit the students who take that course next year, but it could help me advance my contribution to the research program of the department. I ask that the proposal be approved.

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 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 studied.

The current system for awarding TAs, as far as I know, 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 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.

Both Mladen and David say that TAs should be able to learn the material, because they are Ph.D. students. This is far too facile. They can learn it, but they should not be forced to learn it in two weeks before the semester starts. This puts them under a lot of pressure, and takes time away from something else, either their research or their TA duties, or both. If a TA is hired for 20 hours/week, let's say it takes 8 hours a week to learn the material; then (s)he has 12 hours left for TA duties. The half-time support has morphed into quarter-time support plus epsilon.

Some suggestions

I have several ideas on how to address this problem. I will try not to go into too much detail, but let me mention a couple.

• Hire TAs based on the courses they are qualified to assist with. In ECE, for example, the DGP gets recommendations from the areas on which incoming students to award TAs to. The area faculty look at the TA's transcript and statement of purpose and decide which applicants are likely to be able to cover their courses. I don't say this is the way that CSC should do it, but it would be good to seek more input from faculty on the aptitude of Ph.D. applicants for TA positions.

• For graduate courses, have the IT staff, let's say, keep track of the TAs who have taken each course and the number of semesters left in their TA appointments. Then, when the number of TA-semesters left for some course gets "too low," the faculty in charge of the course could be warned to recruit more TAs into the course the next time around. This would help give the DGP many more options in assigning suitable TAs. Everyone wins: The faculty, the DGP, the TAs, and the students in the courses who would benefit from better TA support.