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Very few professors are granted tenure, as was the case in the past. It's weakly non-zero: times have changed. There are far more adjunct professors today. Universities are more run like businesses than in decades past.

I don’t have data, but I think most tenure track professors get tenure (if not at their current university, than another).

Adjunct professors are not tenure track, so there is really no expectation that they would get tenure. Though I have seen the numbers that say the number of adjuncts is increasing.

The point is that far fewer professors are tenure track to begin with, compared to past decades.

Almost every lecturer my wife has is tenure track or already tenured.

One of them just plays videos of himself in his lectures. He doesn't actually go to them. He is actually around during less than half of his scheduled office hours. He complains to (and at least once has shouted at) the TAs about how students keep asking him questions. He has tenure.

As a former TA for one of the "bad" professors, you can somewhat rescue your rating, but you basically have to be a hero, and the professor needs to not be malicious (if the prof wants to fail everyone, not a lot you can do).

You have to attend every lecture (I did anyway), redirect / fix during discussion / lab, help them learn what they need to know to pass the exams, and if you have time, what they should remember when the term is over for their future academic / work careers.

Only bad ratings I recall were from students who only attended the last discussion section; it's hard to teach 10 weeks of theoretical CS in 50 minutes.

Ohhhh, I thought that's what "CS50" meant!

Not my experience - being a TA for a bad professor or bad course involved more work but gets one better evaluations. You're the "good guy". If the professor is good, the standards are higher and you can't leave their shadow.

> TAs also get punished if the actual instructor is bad - because students blame everyone in the course.

You think that's bad, try being instructor of record for a remedial math course as a TA.

It would be easy enough to normalize for those trends right? (seems like a solvable problem)

> they by design don’t provide prior exams

Do they reuse past questions forever? That is a bad practice. Each term's exams need to be equivalent but different.

The way to ensure that they’re different is to require all prior assessment be publicly available - if someone having access to an old exam gives them an unfair advantage over people who don’t then that’s bad design.

I suspected that, and asked for clarification.

Oh sorry I interpreted it as a hypothetical or something :)

My interpretation of the way US lecturers work is that they may reuse entire exams. Especially as a lot just get exams from book publishers.

In NZ (at Canterbury at least) all exams are archived and available in the libraries, and most also as PDFs. All of them. Shelf after shelf stretching back decades. At least back when I was there - maybe it’s different now? Publishers selling exam material as part of their text books seems to be moderately recent

It can be even worse - I’ve seen TAs who basically serve up assignment solutions trying to get high ratings.