<p>“Frustrated with this, we both decided to go in and discuss this with the TA together. I explained to him the amount of work that went into the assignments and that the strict grading was not acceptable”</p>
<p>No. Your discussing this with theTA is unacceptable. I don’t care how they do it in whatever country you come from. The only reason I would ever talk to my children’s professors or TAs is in a true life or death situation. It’s unacceptable. And the fact that you know other people who are also inappropriate doesn’t make your inappropriateness any better.</p>
<p>OP, it sounds like you are not confident in your Daughter’s abilities to handle her college coursework and experience on her own, like her classmates are all doing. Does she have learning problems? Did you do her high school work for her too? Who exactly applied to be accepted to college? You, or your daughter? If you helped her so much through high school too, maybe she really isn’t capable of college work without you. Either way, it is time to allow your daughter to do her schoolwork on her own; you are not throwing her to the wolves, you are allowing her to use her own mind and intellect, and to be judged on HER abilities, not yours. Are you afraid she will fail? When she gets her first job are you going to help her write reports, or do whatever tasks are assigned there too? If she makes it through college only due to your help, she may not actually have the knowledge or ability to handle a job. Are you intending for her to make it on her own eventually? When? How will you know when it is time for her to try things on her own? College coursework is hardly dangerous; she should be doing it on her own. She can call you for advice, or to complain, and you can give advice, etc, but YOU are not the student, SHE is, and she should be handling college work on her own and get whatever grades she earns ON HER OWN.</p>
<p>At the schools I am familiar with, a student would probably get a zero on work if the professor knew they were not doing their own work. They could also be given a failing grade in the entire class with a notation that the F was for cheating.</p>
<p>Want to hear something really scary? I’m a sophomore undergraduate student who, as a TA, is responsible for 30% of my students’ grades. The power!</p>
<p>Undergraduate TAs are actually quite common in some departments at my university. They seem to be doing a fine job and students generally like them.</p>
<p>Very nicely done ■■■■■ work. I applaud the OP for his/her creative writing skills. Major weakness was a summer course being far enough along in late May for the daughter to already have this so much work and grading. Also, the contact your congresswoman thing was a but much. Lastly, posting in the College Life Forum instead of the Parents Forum was a dead giveaway. Overall, an A minus. (And there is no way to appeal that grade.)</p>
<p>Thank you everyone for all the comments. Looking back, the threats we made to the University probably did not help, but we were genuinely furious. Honestly, we did not know about TAs when we applied. I’m not sure why this came as a surprise to some, but it honestly never entered our thought process during her search for schools, or perhaps we ignored it. My daughter has transferred to a smaller school now, where she will be getting attention from faculty members, not students. The “teaching assistant” in question is a PhD student but did NOT have a master’s degree (I’m not sure this is even permissible, but it seems like anything goes at her prior institution) and was essentially running a follow up engineering course offered in the summer (it was a series of projects/exams extending the material from the spring term and she chose to try to get it out of the way in summer). Please note, the TA is not the only reason for her transfer. The professor for the class sometimes DID NOT SHOW UP to class and essentially told them that he was treating them as employees, responsible to him for these projects. When he did show up, he left early. While I had trouble believing this, I looked up the instructor on the ratemyprofessor website and found NUMEROUS complaints over a period of 8 years of various students complaining about this faculty member and his over reliance on teaching assistants, leaving early, lack of instruction, etc. What’s worse, my daughter explained that the TA frequently made errors on the board and really didn’t know what he was even teaching, essentially learning as he went. Everyone has bad experiences, but the fact that it was seriously hindering her grade was unacceptable. She left the class with a C and has now transferred to Seton Hill university, which EMPHASIZES the use of faculty over students. It is my understanding there are NO teaching assistants there. The admissions staff empathized with my concerns and stated that they had heard the same story over and over again from other transfer students and that their university understood graduate students are not competent instructors. During the application process, somehow we were ignorant of this. I never came on forums like this and neither did she. It has been so many years since I was in University, I assumed things had not changed. Similarly, my daughter expected she would be taught by a professor, not by another student. I see now why the education system in this country sucks. You can not possibly defend a 23 year old running an engineering class, for which students are paying thousands of dollars. When she approached the professor about the TA’s incompetence, the professor became dismissive. At this point, as a parent, I intervened. I do not regret my decision to intervene. I have all documentation/paper trail of my interactions with him. While it was against University policy, she recorded several lectures delivered by the TA, in which a 23 year old, with seemingly no preparation, attempts to teach a class, scribbling on the board and making mistakes which the class corrects. This is NOT an education that my daughter wants and, as a parent, I will not pay for this. I seriously encourage all parents to raise hell with University administration about the fact that STUDENTS are controlling other STUDENTS grades. The fact that people have become so conditioned to this and so beat down by the system shows how far the Overton Window has, in fact, moved. I truly hope this will be helpful to other parents shocked to discover their children’s grades are being controlled by other children and will help them decide on a better facility.</p>
<p>Almost all research universities use TA’s. It may have come as a surprise to you, but most people are aware of this. Given the fact that higher education in America is considered to be the best in the world, I don’t think that having parents complain to universities is going to change anything. Our universities’ prestige is a result of their groundbreaking research, so it would make no sense for them to reduce their researchers’ productivity because a few people are unhappy with their TAs. Their prestige is going to attract students and donations regardless of what parents complain about. Also, I personally think that parents shouldn’t even involve themselves in their children’s academic careers past high school except under extreme circumstances. College is supposed to be as much about learning in the classroom as it is about learning to become an independent adult.</p>
<p>For STEM classes, grades are supposed to be more objective than the general feeling the professor has, let alone the general feeling the TA has.</p>
<p>This may be different for classes like math and the like but I was a TA for several biology classes (that had both mathematical and concept-based questions), and to be honest, some of the grading really was just “instinct” or born out of experience and a gut feeling. I mean, it came out of grading hundreds of tests, but sometimes it’s not exactly cut and dry when you’re awarding partial credit. To a lot of students, the grading can seem harsh because they get points off for parts of the answer or solution that they didn’t include or things they wrote that were technically incorrect, and there’s really no reason why they should get one point off or half a point off. It’s just what the grader feels like, really, and the #1 rule is that everything has to be consistent.</p>
<p>Students argue for more points to wrong answers, all the time, and really, if you receive any credit at all for a wrong answer, it should be a good thing. Most students, I’ve found, see that as really harsh because they might only get half-credit for their wrong answer, and I think it’s hard for them to understand or care that EVERYONE got half-credit if they wrote that wrong answer. Sometimes, it really is just a “general feeling” that this answer deserves one point less than the correct and complete answer. The arbitrariness usually comes in when you’re trying to decide whether to take off one point or two for certain things, and at that point, it’s really just experience and whatever the professor thinks.</p>
<p>It’s not the difference between this answer is right and this answer is wrong. It’s the difference between this answer is worth 10 points and this answer is worth 8 points, and sometimes, that’s just a judgement call, depending on what you’re looking for or expecting students to be able to do.</p>
<p>I am fairly sure this is a ■■■■■ post, given the interesting timing of posts/posting history of the OP–but in the spirit of being responsive to someone seeking “help”:</p>
<p>What I find frightening is that, even with your “help”-- your daughter is not up to the standards of the class, because there are an awful lot of students in that class who are doing better than the both of you put together.</p>
<p>Have you considered that?</p>
<p>So–</p>
<p>would your daughter do better without your help? As in, maybe your help, as well intentioned as it may be, is detrimental to her learning the material the way it is meant to be learned.</p>
<p>or</p>
<p>maybe your daughter should find academic areas more suited to her strengths.</p>
<p>His name is Don Chiarulli at the University of Pittsburgh. I am not seeking “help” so much as trying to raise awareness among parents about the presence of TAs in higher learning, so that they make better informed choices about their child’s education. That’s all. I really think these places that review universities should include a section about reliance on TAs. By the way, there’s a lot of mistrust and speculation on the Internet, but it’s not unexpected, honestly. Really, I’m not even requesting comments, I just want the story known. I personally was disinclined to take my daughter’s word at face value until I saw what was going on first hand. She now is enrolled in the 3+2 program at Seton Hill University and will be attending in the Spring. Thank you all for your support and concern.</p>