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Comment by thanatosmin | Hacker News Reader

I see a lot of discussion about the consequences of TAs withholding grades. This situation is a consequence of poor management at UCSC. Every other university I'm familiar with makes faculty responsible for submitting grades. It's inconceivable to me why TAs would be responsible for grades. TAs should be teaching assistants, not adjunct faculty.

Edit: I read "assigning grades" to mean assigning the final grades for the course, not grading homework and exams. I'm pretty sure this is the responsibilities the TAs had, because UCLA sent out a memo to all the faculty explaining that senate faculty are responsible for grades here.

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Most faculty does not want to grade anything. I've TA'ed 6 courses, the professor just showed up for lectures and reused last year's exams/homeworks. Students had the solutions, >70% of the class copied them exactly. The prof didn't care. And TA's were handling most complaints about the grades. This was common for majority of undergrad level classes I took (a different UC campus).

Also, it was my job as a TA to explain the material during my TA sections (which were basically lectures, only with more questions and more examples, and I used a blackboard while the prof just read PP slides).

Even though the above was the norm, there were a few great professors who cared, and taught very well.

No offence, but that sounds like a really shitty school to me.

It's ranked top-50 in the nation.

Good example for the uselessness of rankings then.

To be fair, the profs were usually world class experts in their respective fields, and the quality of graduate-level classes was really high.

Research universities prioritize research when hiring professors, not teaching.

The operative word here is ‘should be.’ In practice, at the state school where I did my doctorate, more than half of undergrad courses are taught by grad students...academia is a broken system that doesn’t work very well for anyone involved in it

Edit: this was the case in my department, a STEM subject required for graduation in multiple unrelated majors

academia is a broken system that doesn’t work very well for anyone involved in it

It works extremely well for administrators and professors with tenure, who are the exact constituencies most in favor of stasis and least in favor of change or experimentation.

Meh, it works well enough. I’d ask Napolitano or the UCSC faculty whose grad students are striking if it’s working extremely well for them. Grants are scarce. CA negotiated a single contract for grad students across nine different campuses all over a huge state, and no one seems happy with the outcome...sure I’d rather be chancellor, but ‘extremely well’ is a stretch

Strange. every university im familiar with has grad students teaching courses, not just TAing. i did it myself.

Maybe it's more common than I thought... I've only ever seen TAs teaching discussion sections.

Depends on the course. For a large 300 person bio lecture, it will be the professor lecturing and the TA leading a quiz/homework section with like 30 people. For smaller classes with only 30 people, it's probably going to be a TA lecturing.

As an undergrad Instructional Aide (aka IA aka TA) at the University of Michigan I taught labs/discussions as well as graded homeworks and exams.

Edited my comment. I'm pretty sure at UCSC TAs were also responsible for assigning the final grades in a course.

Hmm. Even if TAs don't assign grades for a course, if they refuse to grade the assignments that can make it extremely difficult for the professor to give the students accurate grades.

The prof would have to just go through the stack themselves then.

I think "just" is underselling it a little. When we would grade exams it was quite an ordeal. The professor and all the IAs (maybe 5-8) would be in a room and grade all day long. We would order food delivered to the room so we could keep grading straight through meals.

Having 1 person do all that work would be intimidating.

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