Word: tfs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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History Department Chair Andrew D. Gordon said that while the preassignment program—which is being implemented gradually across the humanities and the social sciences—is “on balance positive,” graduate students should be assigned as TFs based on teaching ability, not financial need...
Instead of fellowships and training programs, we again encourage the curricular review’s committee on pedagogy to make greater course-head oversight of TFs mandatory. More sections should be taped, and the College should require course heads to review the recordings and complete written evaluations of their TFs. Professors should then deposit those evaluations in a permanent file accessible to other course heads. The College should also require professors to meet often with TFs to discuss sections and course material...
Finally, professors should do more of their own grading. Evaluation of student work is just as essential to the learning process as course lectures. Yet TFs are almost always the ones grinding through final exams and term papers, making grading at the College often radically subjective and frustratingly inconsistent. Indeed, students often complain that the grades they get reflect the random personal biases, understandings or misunderstandings of their TFs more than the relative quality of the work they did. These claims must, of course, be adjusted for some students’ frustration at getting low grades. But considering the mountains...
...problem of inconsistent TF grading at the College. But we believe that professors, who have a great deal more experience judging student work and have a better handle on the expectations of a particular course, should grade at least a share of student papers and read over work TFs have already graded for quality control...
...often at Harvard, aloof superstar professors let their TFs do most of the real teaching, whether the grad students are ready to handle discussion sections or not. This hit-or-miss method of undergraduate education is the critical problem facing undergraduate education at the University, and we expect the College to do more than make TFs take a class...