Better qualified TAs

The challenge of finding a qualified TA

Many faculty have been assigned TAs who have not taken their courses. This is not a problem if the TAs have taken a similar course, or learned the material in some other way. But often, they have not. 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. 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 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.

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 that CSC should do it exactly this way, 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 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.

It seems unlikely to me that these changes could eliminate all situations where there is no TA qualified for a course. In these cases, I would support hiring someone on the biweekly payroll who has the necessary background. This has been done in other departments, and in CSC until the past few years. It doesn't have to be expensive. The trick is to minimize the need for these exceptions. I believe the above ideas would do that.

By adopting a lookahead approach, the department should be able to avoid situations where, three weeks before the start of the semester, it is realized that there is no way to assign a TA who knows the course material. We can create a process that provides better support to the faculty, better help for the students, lower stress for the TAs, and less pressure on the DGP.