<p>At Ohio State University, my experience has been that Honors classes are taught by profs while regular courses are taught by teaching assistants (TAs, usually masters’ or PhD students). There is a huge difference. My general Chemistry and first year calc physics classes in Honors are about 30 people per lecture and are taught by professors who really cared for their subject (I got freshman chem taught by a “distinguished” quantum theorist and electricity and magnetism by a superconductivity researcher). In contrast, regular science courses have class sizes in the hundreds and are taught by disinterested TAs. Outside the sciences, I have found that freshman Honors courses are often taught by emeritus/semi retired professors, which still are a lot better than TAs. It was interesting to have a 25 person first year psych class taught by an experienced clinical psychologist instead of a grad student. That being said, only 10% of the class is Honors, and otherwise, freshman courses are notoriously bad. There are horror stories about disinterested TAs who care only for their PhD thesis or inarticulate grad students who barely know English.</p>
<p>Maybe it depends on the major, but at UCLA, my classes have been taught by Professors. If there are discussion sessions, those are taught by TAs. But discussions sessions aren’t really lecture, they mainly have served the function of adding to lecture, explaining concepts/answers that a student might have not understood in lecture.</p>
<p>The only exception to the above is the summer session classes. In some summer session classes, graduate students teach entire courses. From my experience the TA’s tend to not be any different from professors, if anything they’re more relate-able, more available to students, and more engaging than professors.</p>
<p>I go to a large state school (Maryland) and been in introductory math, science, chemistry, and English classes. The only things not taught by professors have been labs, and writing workshops, where having a younger grad student teach is actually beneficial because they will a) not feel like they neccesarily know what’s best for a story and b) be able to better relate to the topics a 19 or 20 year old is writing about. They’re more there to facilitate discussion anyway.
My larger lectures have all had discussion groups once a week. My Orgo TA (who I’m excited to have again for Orgo 2) was often better at breaking down topics than the professor (who was not a bad teacher, she just went fast). For Calc 2 I stopped going to lecture (I’d taken the class in high school anyway) because the professor taught like he was teaching a remedial math class and the TA was decent.</p>
<p>“Why would you have a distinguished math teacher teaching calculus? It makes no sense. They have high school teachers teaching introductory calculus…”</p>
<p>My Calc III professor was very distinguished (he also teaches Calc I and Calc II). Undergrad from Harvard and PhD from Brown. Has done tremendous amounts of research.</p>
<p>He was also the absolute best math professor I’ve ever had. His extensive background in mathematics, and his unique ability to explain it so everybody could understand it, was truly a gift. The professor loves to teach mathematics, and I was lucky to have him instead of some GA/TA, etc.</p>
<p>I think it’s important to have a good teacher for something like Calculus, especially if you are getting a quantitative based degree, because Calculus is used so often in upper division classes in those fields.</p>
<p>TA’s are actually great at leading discussion sessions and smaller groups and in many cases are better people to ask questions than profs are, for the sole reason that they were in your shoes not too long ago… TA’s are great, I don’t know why people always assume that they are worse than profs. Especially in the sciences where there are so many professors that take classes they teach as a distant second to their personal research.</p>
<p>The only thing I don’t like about TAs is that in my experience MANY of them are foreign, often Asian, and I cannot understand anything they’re saying. For one class I got so frustrated that I stopped going to discussion - he barely understood English. For example once when we were talking about “light rail,” he said “light trail” for the whole class (he kept writing it on the board). He couldn’t answer questions either since he hardly understood anything.</p>
<p>This semester I actually rather like my TAs, however. All of them speak lovely English and in one case I like my TA more than my professor and she seems a little more knowledgeable than he does. There’s also one who’s kind of awkward, though, which isn’t great in a sex discussion but it’s definitely okay. So I don’t think you can really make a generalization.</p>
<p>I think TAs whole teaching classes is an urban myth. It was probably something that happened frequently when our parents’ generation were in school, but it sounds like for the most part its been abolished. </p>
<p>I don’t think professors go to labs in general. In my experience they don’t even see or grade them. As for discussions I’ve never heard a professor go to those either.</p>
<p>Chem lecture: professor
Chem lab: TA</p>
<p>Here at Cornell, this semester, my Math class (Mulrivariable Calculus for Math-related majors) is being taught by a TA</p>
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<p>The second skill he had is more important than the first skill, I think. I don’t think that you need to be the best in the first skill in order to be good at the second skill.</p>
<p>I’ve had courses taught by non-phDs at both a private and a public college. At the private school, a top LAC, the teacher had a MAT and was teaching introductory calculus, which I personally had no problem with. Having a phD in math doesn’t necessarily make one any good at explaining calculus to a freshman, and she clearly knew her subject matter very well. At the public, I took an introductory linguistics course that was taught by a phD student. Again, she was very knowledgable in her subject matter, and even though she wasn’t officially a professor, I enjoyed her course more than some that I’ve had taught by tenured professors.</p>
<p>I’ve had one TA-taught class at UCLA, but it was in the summer so most professors were on vacation. TAs normally only teach smaller discussion sections, and the main lectures are taught by professors.</p>
<p>At community college a little over half my professors had PhDs, and all the ones teaching advanced subjects like multivariable calc, physics, DE, or LA did.</p>
<p>Well, Harvard is a private university, and it certainly uses TAs. It calls them Teaching Fellows and Tutors (resident and non-resident), but they are essentially TAs. My DH was one.</p>
<p>As a senior at a 40k+ university, I can say that I’ve only had ONE class that was taught by a TA, and it wasn’t in my major.</p>
<p>Every university, public or private uses TAs for various assisting functions: grading, running review sections, supervising labs… Virtually none places a TA in charge of teaching a class. They make the class run smoothly and allow the professors to focus on the actual teaching. In many cases the TAs are post-docs or grad students with intimate knowledge of the material. At major research universities, the TAs may actually have greater mastery of the material than an average professor at a smaller university, especially in the sciences. Sometimes labs are conducted by specialized technical personnel with specific expertise in operating the test equipment. </p>
<p>The TA system at many private universities is actually not very different from the tutorial/supervision systems at Oxford and Cambridge, where university appointed professors hold lectures and practical classes and the Tutors/Supervisors appointed by the individual colleges hold small group recitations. Many tutors/supervisors are actually graduate students in the discipline. Depending on the college, the same tutor/supervisor may cover multiple classes in different subjects which can be more problematic. The issue of adequate teaching training of tutors/supervisors has been a recurring issue for students at Oxford and Cambridge and the quality is extremely variable. In the past, wives of dons and lawyers from London would often act as tutors as a form of “adjunct faculty”. </p>
<p>So, the division of duties between professors and assistant staff, whether at US or foreign universities, is far from new. The idea of combining all of the duties in a single person has largely been abandoned and while still feasible in some of the humanities disciplines, is completely impractical in the sciences, with the increased specialization and explosion of information. Asking full professors to run lab sections would most likely result in a reduction in teaching effectiveness not in an increase.</p>
<p>I’ve never taken a class that was taught by a TA. The professors teach the classes and the TA’s lead discussion or lab. This applies to UCR and UCLA (and probably the whole UC system).</p>
<p>I think it also varies by department. For instance, here at UVA, all Calculus classes are taught as 40 person sections by TAs exclusively. However, if you take computer science classes in the engineering school, you will have a large (100-500 person) lecture taught by a professor (and then TAs for discussion sections) because of the accreditation (for instance, for CS, by ABET). Astronomy here is taught as a large lecture with no discussion sections. I’ve also had classes handed off to TAs to teach entirely, because of funding issues, however those were in the education school where a prerequisite to admission to a grad program includes prior teaching experience.</p>
<p>Butler University:
0 TAs. :)</p>
<p>This is at the University of South Carolina. My English 102 class was taught by a TA (no professors for these classes, keep enrollment at 25 or under), and I have a National Security class taught by a woman in the last semester of her phD studies this semester, but besides that I haven’t had any TAs teach the class. I skipped a couple classes known for TA discussions though - US History and a lab science, and I am taking an honors section of another science this semester so no TA.</p>
<p>My statistics lab was taught by a TA last spring as well, but it was basically just graphing things on the computer. No real information to absorb.</p>
<p>well i go to a community college and there are only perfessers teaching</p>