Many of you will get a chance to be a TA/Reader during graduate school, be it part of the requirement for your PhD program, your love for teaching or for some extra cash. UCI differentiates between a reader and a TA in terms of responsibilities.
As a TA, you are responsible for:
– Assisting the supervising faculty member by conducting discussion, laboratory or quiz sections that supplement faculty lectures
– Grading assignments or examinations
– May provide input into the development of assignments or exams, and hold office hours
As a Reader, you are responsible for:
– Grading of homework, papers, laboratory reports, or examinations and
– Holding of office hours to respond to students’ questions about such assignments
The requirements for being a teaching assistant/ reader can be found here
To apply for a TA/ Reader position, you should contact your respective department manager. Usually, they send an email with the instructions to submit TA/Reader application before the start of every quarter.
The following guide may be helpful in carrying out your responsibilities. If you have any confusion, you should always discuss it with the course instructor. If you think you are spending more time than required for the appointment (usually 20hr/week), notify your course instructor so they can do something about it.
Discussions:
Plan ahead of time! Usually, planning for discussions takes a lot longer than the actual discussion time. You should discuss the material that you will cover during discussion with the course professor. It is always a good idea to leave some time at the end to answer questions if possible.
Grading:
Prepare the solution for the exam you are grading. In some cases, the professor may provide the solution to you.
Prepare a rubric for grading the exams. It might be useful to look at the answers of a few students so you can get an idea about the kind of mistakes you will see. The rubric helps not only in grading but also in explaining to the students why they lost points.
Office hours:
Make sure students know the location/your office hours’ time. The department should provide you a place to hold office hours. You can contact your department manager/course instructor.
Making assignments/Exams:
The course instructor may ask your input for making assignment/exam questions. Make sure the questions are relevant to the course material and doable within the time frame provided for exam/assignment.
Answering emails:
Try to respond to them within a day. You may fix a time during the day when you answer emails by students so you don’t miss any email.
Online Discussion Forum:
Your course professor may decide to use online discussion forum like piazza to answer student questions. They can be very helpful because you don’t have to answer a question multiple times for different students through email. It’s best to give students some time to figure out the answer by themselves. If you think they figured out the solution, you can just endorse it and won’t have to answer yourself. Like answering emails, do not make them wait too long for the answer.
In the end, remember, you are not solely responsible for anything. All the responsibilities should be carried out under the course instructor’s supervision so always keep them in loop.
Thank you such a wonderful post, Sameera. You bring up some great tips, one of the most important one being that we are not responsible for anything. Always, always report back to professors, especially when any issues in the course come up.
Grading was definitely one of the harder elements to adjust to, especially in a social science program. Teaching classes and grading papers where students had a high degree of flexibility in their paper topic made it sometimes difficult to have standardized grading strategies. Below are some tips i’ve found helpful when dealing with tough grading scenarios:
– Standardizing across students: Providing clear instructions and assignment expectations beforehand can help standardize sections across papers. Additionally, having a rubric with clear point values for each section makes it easy for students to see where deductions took place.
– Getting a sense of the variety of responses: I personally like to read through at least 20-30% or so paper and make comments/assign preliminary grades prior to finalizing a rubric and a grading strategy.
– It’s a marathon, not a race: Remember to take frequent breaks from the grading. It is easy for responses to start to blend together, and to minimize the risk of error (and grumpy grading syndrome), i like to stop after every 5 or 10 students, depending on how long it takes to get each through paper.
– Consult other TAs: Check in throughout the grading phase with other TAs and the instructor to make sure that your expectations align with theirs.