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.