Category: Teaching

And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche.

On grading university essays

Grading is an intellectually and morally challenging process. A task that will affect how people are judged in the future and what their life prospects will be isn’t simply a commercial transaction, even if grading is your job.

No single essay or exam grade determines how a student’s transcript ends up, or what consequences that has for their life. There is some comfort in knowing that if a bunch of well-meaning people grade a series of efforts over several years with decent methodologies and all make small errors, there is reason to hope hope that the aggregate result will be basically accurate.

Nonetheless, it is challenging to be presented with a succession of analyses which vary across multiple axes (quality of argument, quality of writing, theoretical stance, use of references, etc) and then try to rank the set in a way that is fair and justifiable.

It’s certainly the case that people approach grading with different philosophies. For instance, I know some TAs attribute importance to whose paper they are looking at, and the history of their interaction with that person. Does this represent a lot of effort on the part of the author, based on everything you know? How does it fit into a general pattern of effort?

Personally, I think it is fairer and more justifiable to ignore the author to the maximum possible extent. I would prefer if papers bore student numbers only, to avoid the bias that necessarily accompanies name recognition (or recognition that the author of a paper has never attended a tutorial).

I spend a lot of time hand writing comments and corrections on every paper I grade, despite knowing that only a small fraction of students ever collect them. Next year, I will suggest to the professor who I am TAing for that they include the following in the syllabus: one week after essay grades are posted, your papers will be available for pickup. Papers which are not collected will have 5% deducted from the grade.

CUPE 3902 tentative agreement

I am at Convocation Hall for a meeting of the members of CUPE3902 Unit 1 – the union for teaching assistants at the University of Toronto.

We are discussing a tentative agreement which the bargaining team reached with the administration late last night.

To me, the proposed deal looks deeply inadequate. They are proposing wage increases of 1%, 1%, 1.25%, and 1.25% over the next four years.

For starters, the Bank of Canada calculator shows that the real value of the funding package has fallen by 9.89% since it was set in 2008. In addition, the proposed wage increases don’t even keep up with inflation for the years in which they happen.

We will see what happens in this meeting, but I hope my fellow union members won’t accept something so inadequate. The objective here is to get beyond poverty wages for TAs – not to reduce them further.

CUPE 3902: Unit I strike vote

The union that represents me as a teaching assistant at the University of Toronto is holding a strike vote.

They are calling for more generous funding packages for TAs, increased health and childcare benefits, and a few other things. U of T is especially stingy when it comes to graduate funding packages. The standard package of $23,000 minus about $8,000 tuition (and assuming 210 hours of work as a TA) doesn’t cover the cost of living in Toronto, requiring most TAs to either borrow or do additional outside work.

I don’t know how I feel about the strike vote. I am pretty wary about unions in general (especially when it comes to public sector unions). That is because of how they often seem to defend particular interests as opposed to the general welfare, and often establish and perpetuate inequalities between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’. I also don’t know what the prospects are for a strike actually improving TA pay at U of T.

Voting goes on until November 18th, so I will need to do some more thinking and decide before then.

What Harvard tenure requires

The Harvard Crimson has a piece on the school’s tenure program and what is necessary to succeed in it. It probably gives a flavour of what tenure committees throughout academia are looking for:

“It is necessary to become a world expert in your field, publish great
papers in good journals, develop a healthy funding pipeline, and do
responsible service for the College and the University.

…

‘Being a faculty member here is like having three full time jobs on top of each other,’ Cox says. ‘There are only so many hours in the day. An hour spent on teaching is an hour not spent in the lab doing research or an hour not spent writing a grant proposal.'”

I suppose it demonstrates how multi-talented a person needs to be in order to secure tenure at a first-rate institution; not only must you be a capable and accomplished researcher, but you also need to be able to bring money in and serve your school’s teaching and administrative needs.

Writing advice for undergraduates

I am in the middle of grading stacks of undergraduate essays. If I could give one piece of advice to the students, it would be that they should read their essays aloud to themselves when preparing the final version.

For each sentence, they should ask:

  1. What is the argument I am trying to make with this sentence?
  2. Do I make my point clearly?
  3. Is there any way I can make the sentence simpler or more specific?

Most essays I have looked at have included sentences that no person would leave unchanged after reading them aloud. All the essays have featured sentences that are unnecessarily convoluted or too vague to express much of anything.

Particularly when your essay is destined to end up in a stack to be assessed by a grad student teaching assistant, it is essential to make sure that your sentences are comprehensible and advance the overall argument you are making.

Allocation of TA hours

For the introductory international relations course where I am serving as a teaching assistant (TA), I have been assigned two weekly tutorials with 25 students each.

  • There are six lectures which I am required to attend, over the year (6 x 2 hours = 12 hours).
  • Then there are two hours of tutorial per week for 20 weeks (40 hours).
  • Then, I am to be available for one office hour per week for 24 weeks (24 hours).
  • I have one hour per week to do the course readings (24 hours).
  • I am to grade 100 papers at a rate of 1/2 hour per paper, plus 100 exams at 20 minutes per exam (83 hours).
  • Finally, there are 27 hours assigned for additional lectures, preparation, and reading.

In total, I am to do 210 hours of TA work in order to qualify for the University of Toronto’s guaranteed PhD student funding package.

If I succeed in getting an Ontario Graduate Scholarship or Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council scholarship, I may not need to work as a TA next year.

First teaching course at U of T

I found out which course I will be working as a teaching assistant for during my first year at U of T: POL208Y1Y with Professor Lilach Gilady. It’s an introductory international relations course, so chances are I have already covered most of the syllabus at UBC and Oxford.

In fact, the textbook – Baylis and Smith’s The Globalization of World Politics – has been on my bookshelf for several years already.

Dealing with plagiarism as a teaching assistant

One aspect of starting a PhD program is that I will be responsible for working as a teaching assistant: teaching seminars, grading papers, and so on.

I am worried about the inevitable day when I discover that a student has committed plagiarism and when I am in the position of having to decide what to do about it.

So far, the best plan seems to be to issue a stern warning during my first session with each group of students. It could be something along the lines of:

Do not submit plagiarized work to me.

If you do, you will be reported to the appropriate disciplinary authorities without exception.

You are here to earn meaningful degrees. Plagiarism devalues all of the work you are doing, and I will not tolerate it.

It’s unfair to give some people second chances or the benefit of the doubt while denying it to others. Being consistent seems important, and it also seems plausible that a sufficiently strong warning could prevent the problem from ever coming up in the first place.

Sorting v. teaching in universities

Young people around the world spend tens of thousands of dollars and years of their lives getting university degrees. Partly, that is justified by the unique experience of being a university student. At the same time, it is argued that university confers lifelong benefits. I can think of three major ways in which that could happen:

  • Students learn about the things they are actually studying, whether that’s ancient Greek drama or engineering
  • Students learn skills in the process of studying, such as time management and interpersonal skills
  • Universities sort people: separating those who can handle the kind of competition they foster from those who cannot

While I think universities push the first argument hardest, it is the second and third that are most plausible. Most people only have a small amount of time to devote to sizing up a stranger. That is especially true of anybody who might hire you. What a university degree conveys in a small amount of space is that you have the skills required to get through that process. Rather than actually invest the time and effort to evaluate your capabilities, the person evaluating you can accept this information ‘as read’.

Perhaps one practical message to derive from this hypothesizing is that there are two sorts of university degrees that can be pursued. There is the minority subset where the actual information you learn is the most valuable thing. This includes fields like engineering, medicine, and accounting. Then there are those in which ‘soft skills’ and the sorting process are the principal value, at least from the perspective of employers.