The Badger Herald

OPINION & EDITORIAL

Write, don’t whine over teaching assistants

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Also by Rachel Krystek:

Bulimia, anorexia too grave to ignore (October 23, 2007)
Write, don't whine over teaching assistants (November 20, 2007)
Wireless Outages remove studious spark from College Library (November 6, 2007)
Storm water runoff a serious issue for students (October 9, 2007)
Stop gawking, treat athletes equally (September 25, 2007)

by Rachel Krystek

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

With Thanksgiving only two days away, this week marks the beginning of the holiday season and the ever-closer end of fall semester. Midterm course and teacher evaluations have been filled out and returned. Yet I continue to hear horror stories about unfair grading and TAs from hell. I can't help but wonder, have university standards been lowered to hire underperforming TAs or are the urban legends just propagated by a small group of students?

It is doubtful anyone who has been on this campus for more than one semester has not heard a story about a struggle or discrepancy between a student and a TA. Just last week a friend explained that a student in her class had accidentally turned in a sheet of his lecture notes behind his homework. After receiving the graded homework back a few days later this student found his lecture notes marked and graded with an A. This angered my friend, leading her to question the validity of her grades received in this class in the past.

However, grading is an intricate topic and too subjective to be a measure of teaching quality. Another major issue often voiced by many University of Wisconsin students is difficulty in learning from a TA who speaks English as a second language. Strenuous classes with perplexing information are only made more confusing when student-TA communication is also a challenge. This angst often leads to students voicing their frustration and hostility to their peers.

Yet, there is another more productive medium for this criticism, that of student evaluations of TAs and courses. According to the handbook for the College of Letters and Sciences, the college with whom 70 percent of TAs work, "All new teaching assistants must be evaluated early in the semester for the purpose of teaching improvement." The handbook further explains how each TA, new or not, must be also be evaluated at some point during the semester, depending on how each department sees fit.

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Anonymous (November 20, 2007 @ 12:03pm):

Students who complain about grades their TA's assign them can always complain to the TA's supervising professor, the person who is actually teaching the course. And more often than not, the professor will agree with the TA's assigned grades because that's what the student actually earned.

90% of the complaining about grades is done by the 10% of students who want straight A's but are either unwilling to do the work to earn those grades or just aren't talented enough to earn them.

Anonymous (November 20, 2007 @ 3:29pm):

If you don't like TAs, go to a smaller school. I'm sure Madison informed you that you'd never see a professor for the first few semesters, right?

Anonymous (November 20, 2007 @ 8:31pm):

90% of the complaining about grades is done by the 10% of students who want straight A's but are either unwilling to do the work to earn those grades or just aren't talented enough to earn them.

What? Where are these statistics coming from? I had an Econ101 TA who spoke horrible English. When I went to his office hours I always left feeling frustrated and confused. It's not that I was "unwilling to do the work" or "just not talented enough," I simply did not get sufficient tools to help me succeed.

Anonymous (November 21, 2007 @ 12:12am):

"I simply did not get sufficient tools to help me succeed."

No, you simply are too much of a tool to succeed. If you can't understand your TA, talk to your professor, or track down a classmate who understands the material better than you do. Good students find ways to succeed rather than blaming others for their own failures.

Anonymous (November 21, 2007 @ 8:50am):

The best TA I have Ever had, was at UW. His English was not the best, but he was a true expert in his field. He was able to explain very complex bioinformatics problems to me, better then the text book.

Stop whining and do your homework.

Anonymous (November 28, 2007 @ 1:46pm):

"After receiving the graded homework back a few days later this student found his lecture notes marked and graded with an A."

And this is a complaint??? I'd be thrilled to get an extra A tacked onto my grade.

Anonymous (November 30, 2007 @ 1:28pm):

"Good students find ways to succeed rather than blaming others for their own failures."

Should we really have to struggle that much just to understand the matieral? Shouldn't TAs be able to clearly express thier points? 12:12 was not blaming anyone, he or she just wanted the TA to HELP them (which is of course their JOB.)

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