I only had one class fully taught by a TA with no professor involvement in class. It was a math class, the most basic college-level math class offered, and it was taught an Pakistani grad student. Nobody could really understand him. I’m not sure if it was the language barrier or culture clash, but he also came off as really condescending and resentful about having to teach the material (also several women filed sexism complaints against him). I flunked it.
We did have a math lab with tutors (grad students), but it was less that useful. Same language problems, only a few of the tutors spoke English really well and they tended to be either white or Asian-Americans. They were always overwhelmed with students while the rest of the tutors just sat there because nobody wanted to go to them. I ended up retaking math at a junior college over the summer and trasferring credit.
I was a TA (or fellow, or whatever, I can’t remember the title) for composition classes, too, at UCLA. However, we had excellent support from lecturers. Writing isn’t something you can teach in a lecture anyway, so it’s not really the same thing as replacing a professor.
One of my summer jobs at UCLA was to rate speaking tests for prospective TA/grad students whose first language wasn’t English. I can say that, yes indeed, I rated some as not ready to be a TA. The result was that they had to take an ESL pronunciation course, and apply again.
At UCLA, BTW, an incoming grad can’t “flunk” the TOEFL. You just get a score, like the SAT. Each department sets its own threshold, but they tend to be flexible, if they really want the person in the department.
The university itself, however, still gives all L2 students–once they are admitted to UCLA in general–our own ESL test, which evaluates their (lecture) listening and writing skills. (In fact, I think they still use one writing prompt that I wrote.) About half of these students haven’t taken the TOEFL, because they’re immigrants (almost all undergrads, not international students grads). They might sound like native speakers when they talk, but their writing can be clearly hindered by L1 interference. That is, it has problems beyond what your typical undergrad has. Depending on the results of this test, they may have to take ESL classes focused on academic writing, listening, and note-taking, with speaking as an option.
For the international grad students, the TOEFL supposedly tests for these things, but to be honest, we want to administer own battery, with our own evaluation. They sometimes get upset when our test trumps their TOEFL score, but the result is that they get to take classes with some of the best academic ESL instructors in the country–the people who write the textbooks they use at other schools.
I had an intensive 2nd-year French class team-taught by 2 TAs. They did a perfectly fine job, but hey, second-year college French wasn’t exactly rocket science. And it was a just-for-fun elective for me anyway (though it has certainly come in handy on numerous occasions!).
Oh, I almost forgot - I had a freshman English comp class taught by a TA. She was fabulous, probably the best creative writing teacher I’ve ever had. But in addition to being ABD, she had a ton of other teaching experience.
Both classes had maybe 20 people in them, max.
P.S. I went to NYU. Frankly, the couple of TAs I had were much better teachers than a couple of the profs I had for large (110-plus person) entry-level classes in subjects that I had to take for liberal arts distribution requirements. My anthro survey prof springs to mind; he may well have been a brilliant archaeologist, and he was a very entertaining lecturer, but I learned more about genetics in HS bio than I learned from him (he got some very basic things wrong).
I went to Purdue too! Excluding labs and recitations, I think my freshman year composition classes were the only ones taught by TAs.
Actually, that wasn’t completely true. I had a senior level computer science course that was supposed to be taught by a professor. However, that professor was extremely flaky and had only showed up for the first couple lectures. After that, it was just his TA standing in for him, and he only showed up again a few times. It was ridiculous.
Depends how you define ‘TA.’ In my current department, a TA is by definition not the main lecturer. However, we often have grad students listed as the instructor of record, sometimes even for upper-division required courses.
My undergrad majors both had similar setups. Often, a third- or fourth-year Ph.D. student would be the instructor of record for a required course (e.g. Poli Sci 101) or a special topics course with a very small niche, where it was clear we were learning that person’s thesis (e.g. Politics in Soviet Russia, 1980-1989).
I did my undergraduate at the University of Florida. For the science classes I only had TAs on discussion sections and labs. Now, labs sometime took as much time per week as classes, so I’m not sure to count them together or not. For the most part, though, they were making sure we didn’t screw up the experiments too much. They were approachable, and I remember attending some of their office hours. Neither my bioorganic chemistry nor biochemistry clases had discussion sections (hence, no TAs). In many cases, the TAs were head over heels better than the lecturer. I learned my physics II material thanks to the TAs. My general chemistry TAs were also good.
For my language classes… I think it depends on how big the language is. I took an intermediate level French class and an introductory English composition course, and they were taught by TAs. But in Portuguese, my minor, almost ALL the classes were taught by the two professors with PhDs. I think the only Portuguese class taught by a TA was the “intro to Portuguese for non-Romance language speakers”, which I didn’t take.
I went to a small private religious college, never a class with more than 30 people, but there were TAs in 100 and 200 level chemistry and biology labs. They were also undergrads (there was no grad school attached to the college at that time) and the professor was always around, but the TAs set things up and were the ones to answer our basic questions and collect our lab reports.
I did my undergrad at UF as well (late '90s) and never had an actual class taught by TAs. The TAs just did discussion sections and labs. The one semester of French I took was an honors class, so it was small and taught by a professor.
I don’t think so. When I was a masters student (not even a doctoral candidate) I was a TA for a professor who *attended *exactly three sessions (out of 32, I think). The rest of them he had me teach deliver his lectures. I knew next to nothing about the subject (Commercial Bank Management) and this was a 4xxx level class, almost all students were seniors in their final semester, who were serious about going into banking. They were hosed big time. Most of them knew a lot more about Commercial Banking than I did, because they had taken classes, paid attention to what was going on in the field. Being an international student, I literally didn’t know what a CD was.
The professor was leaving the university at the end of the semester. My advisor, a different prof, told me not to rock the boat, because the offending professor was “in” with powerful people in the department. But it was clear that this was a very unusual and scandalous situation.
This was at Virginia Tech in the early 1990s. The official policy was definitely that even a Post Doc was not supposed to be allowed to regularly conduct lectures.
I’m a little surprised at the answers here. I just looked at the course schedule for my department for this semester (big state school) and I think grad students are teaching more undergrad courses than professors and adjuncts combined. The grad students who teach courses are completely unsupervised - I don’t know that anyone even looks at the syllabus. However, I’m not certain how clued in the undergrad are to this situation. I’ve noticed that a lot of students call their instructors Professor Lastname even when the instructor in question is still working on their MA.
Maybe we should define our terms. By TA, do you mean someone who assists a professor in teaching a course, or do you mean any grad student who teaches?
I had a grad student teach my psych class; there was no professor who check in on anything. I feel we were a little ripped off, not because she was a grad student but because she was not the brightest bulb on the tree.
For example:
she told us that while throwing up is harmful when it comes to bulimia, abusing laxitives is fine. Wonderful advice for college freshmen
less than ten minutes after noting that most of us were 18-19, she asked us how well we remembered the Jonestown massacre…which had happened more than 17 years earlier. She seemed surprised when no one said they could recall it happening.
etc
Maybe this is just paranoia, but I think American universities don’t exactly go out of their way to correct students when they think this grad student teaching the class is actually a professor.
pdts, I think that’s not correct. The name of the professor (non-grad student) and grad student (TA) are both well labeled and written in the syllabus. Only the last name of the professor may appear when registering for the course. I know that when I was registering for some of my lab classes, the instructor section was labeled “Staff”. And in the few courses I had with a grad student, the syllabus labeled him as such.
If the student wants to go on believing that the grad student is really a full-time professor… Well, that is the student’s own stupidity, just as if it is believing that cheating is OK or some other thing that is contrary to what is mentioned in the syllabus. Not a fault of the university if the student doesn’t read it.
And in some cases, yea, students will try to get the discussion section with the “good” TA, who will explain the material better.
I’m not talking about cases where there is a professor and several TAs (where you are right it would be clear). I’m talking about courses the grad student is teaching alone, with up to 40 students. If you look at (say) the list of courses taught this semester in the a humanities department at UNC Chapel Hill, then all there are is a list of courses with names next to them.
When you look at a course with a limit of 40 students and ‘joe bloggs’ next to it, the only way to figure out the status of joe bloggs is to look at his departmental webpage, which he may or may not have if he is a grad student. But of the intro courses, a very large number are taught by grad students.
I’ve certainly had students confuse me with a young professor. The university certainly does not clearly mark (as far as I’m aware) where this is or is not the case. In fact, when I’ve tried to explain to them, they often don’t seem to quite get it – they are surprised that my office is so small, for example. Well it would be small, for a professor.
I’ll chime in as well. I went to a school I refer to as Good Ole FU in the early 90’s. (It’s a large, somewhat famous private university. I’ve said this before but they weren’t into that whole undergrad education thing. Oddly enough they’re also one of the more expensive undergrad schools which is just a kick in the nuts on top of it.) So lets see, actually yes they did have non pHD’s teach courses fairly regularly and no I don’t mean just labs.
I had an econ 101 (microecon) that was taught by a grad student. Actually he was one of the better grad students they had apparently. Also since he was a only a student his teaching hadn’t been completely ruined yet so he was decent. (I’m sure if he kept on with FU he would have learned to be terrible. Oh, I had a lecturer (non-phd) for my intro computer science courses. He was ok but could be better or worse. I know one of the TA’s for an upper level CS course I had actually did one of the intro CS courses so that’s another.)
Actually the one place where grad students were the norm was the foreign language department. Apparently the real professors were too busy to actually teach a language course even though the school claimed how important foreign language was. (You know, claim it’s important and then act exactly the way one would expect if they actually thought it was a huge waste of time which it was.) So anyway in all of my time doing the undergrad torture requirement (Which for me was 8 classes because for me it was rocket science and kept me from taking stuff I was interested in like chem and bio) I had 1 class actually taught by a foreign lang professor.(Oddly enough she at one point accidently admitted that foreign language requirement was horse s**t.) Actually there was one other class taught by a professor but he was with the african studies department, not a language prof. (Which was interesting because he taught French but he disliked the french quite a bit given all the stuff they did to the people in africa plus how arrogant they were against them currently. His specialty was northern africa so that kind of explains why he taught it but also his opinion.)
So for the rest were basically grad students or similar.(I think a few of them might have been “lecturers” but no pHD’s or anything.) I might have given FU a pass if they used this for smaller class sizes (IE 8-10 students) but of course they taught standard sized torture classes. (IE 20-25 students) I especially hated that french bitch who taught one of the courses.(God how I hope she got deported so she would never be inflicted on another student anywhere except france. She was a terrible teacher and horrendously arrogant with claims like “I speak english good enough to teach it.”) Lets just say the end result of that requirement and how these courses were actually implemented is that I learned 2 things.
1 In college people will lie about stuff where it is clearly obvious to both the lier and liee that what is being said is an absolutely bald faced lie. (Hence my statement “The requirement, like cake, is a lie”)
2 I absolutely, intensely, and justifiably despise the french. (It’s funny, I don’t think I would have figured out that I even hated them, let alone have a white hot hatred if the school didn’t shove that language down my figurative throat. Things work out funny sometimes. I wonder if anybody at the school ever has even the barest pang of guilt about what they do to the students sometimes. My guess is probably not.)
At Portland State University, many lower division (and even some upper division) classes are taught by what are called TAs, but each section they teach is theirs completely, with no professor attached, so far as I know. I’m also only speaking for the math department, perhaps it’s different in other departments.
I went to San Jose State for a few years in the '90s, and I don’t recall TAs existing there at all. If they did, I never had them for any classes.
I’m also kind of curious about this concept of “discussion sections” I’ve read about here on the SDMB. I’ve never heard of such a thing.
I had a class taught by a grad student (with no professor attached) in CSCL at U of MN and it was one of the best classes I took. He was smart, funny, enthusiastic, and super hot. He was on an episode of Radiolab last year. Awesome guy.
I’m at a large (30,000+) university, and graduate students regularly teach undergraduate classes. In fact, at least in my department, all doctoral students are given the title of “part-time instructor” for payroll purposes. There is sometimes a course coordinator who is a professor, but the involvement greatly varies. In one class, my job was to lead a discussion section that mostly consisted of grading student projects. In the course I’m teaching now, I lecture, make up exams, assign homework, and and (of course) grade. The coordinator only makes up the final exam.
One of my friends who went to UT fairly recently said that as an undergrad, he never had a class taught by a *professor. *He only had TAs as instructors.
I went to a state university and the only classes I ever saw run by TA’s were science labs (the actual lectures in those classes were still done by profs).
I was calc 1 and 2 by a TA at Penn in 1956-57. No supervisory professor either. He was ok, neither better nor worse than a prof would have been (and better than the guy I later had for Diff Eq, whose name, with the prefix micro-, was taken as the unit of obnoxiousness). I also, around the same time had a TA for a course in American history. In 1958-59, I taught calc 1 and 2 as a TA, getting my AB degree only the middle of that year, so I was actually an undergrad. I don’t think I was any worse than I was later on.
At McGill, TAs are mostly used only to lead “tutorials” (= recitations) but a few do go on to lecture independently. But all multi-section courses have a professor in charge in any case.
We are very careful with language facility. That’s one of the reasons only advanced grad students get to teach. We discovered that TOEFL scores from China are meaningless. There is obviously massive cheating involved. Or at least that was true when I retired almost 11 years ago.