<p>no surprise, in this economic climate, schools tend to save money, so some TA or PhD students teach. It really depends on your luck, some are OK, some are really bad. Especially some TA or PhD students have strong foreign accents, then …, some may have strong prejudice toward different background students, then … u know i mean</p>
<p>agree with mikemac-big problem with second tier public universities relying more and more on part-time, low paid “adjunct” professors.</p>
<p>I go to a private university and could care less. Sometimes I prefer learning from a TA because they teach better than the professor.</p>
<p>Rankings often look at % of classes taught by full-time profs. They want to highlight classes taken by part-time nomadic adjuncts. However, for some subjects, it is much better to have a part-time adjunct prof who has a day job or is recently retired from a career, and has plenty of practical real world experience.</p>
<p>Many colleges have stopped hiring tenure-track full time profs. The colleges that have stayed in the tenure-track hiring market in the last few years have had the opportunity to select truly exceptional profs. Dickinson College in PA for example advertised last year for a tenure track English prof. They had 600 applicants. The applicant pool was so great, they decided to hire 2 profs.</p>
<p>I think it surely depends on the college u choose…</p>
<p>It is the students duty to choose the best college…</p>
<p>I think the best way to choose such colleges is talking to the professors initially through colllege website and just clear the doubts about the classes…</p>
<p>At UC Berkeley, TA’s only lead lab and discussion sections. GSI’s (Graduate Student Instructors) will lead courses that are essentially discussion courses in it of themselves, such as small reading/writing courses with 15 or so people. They are teaching in the department that they are doing research in, so they are usually exceptionally knowledgeable and helpful.</p>
<p>As for all the larger classes, they are mostly all taught by professors (I haven’t seen a large class taught by a GSI listed). Even so the TA’s and GSI’s have usually been working with that class (as a discussion TA or lab TA) for many years, and know the ins and outs of the class just as well as the professors.</p>
<p>Lectures are taught by professors, discussion sections are taught by TAs</p>
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Oh, I don’t know about that. I think a lot of students are oblivious to where and how much graduate students actually teach. </p>
<p>At Duke, for example, graduate students (usually ABDs) teach language courses, basic math courses, lower level English seminars, and sometimes writing courses. Professors also teach sections of each course, mind you, so one is welcome to take the course with them instead. UNC has very similar policies, so I’m skeptical that Duke is unusual in this respect. My current university uses graduate instructors rather heavily for lower level and online history courses; I would imagine other departments use them as well.</p>
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<p>You have to make a distinction between private research universities and private liberal arts colleges. The former are more likely to use TAs in the same way they are used at publics. Besides, the main attraction of private liberal arts colleges over publics isn’t the absence of TAs teaching classes (most private liberal arts colleges do not have grraduate students anyway) it’s the focus on undergraduate education instead of graduate, and the certainty of small classes, impressive faculty to student ratios (e.g., 1:7 or 1:9), and an emphasis on class participation (because classes average 15 or 16 students) instead of lecture. You are forced to 1. show up, and 2. talk–share and defend your ideas. </p>
<p>I have degrees from both public and private Us. I hated the large lecture classes at the public U, regardless of who taught it, TA or prof. That wasn’t the issue. Some TAs teach better than profs, so long as they speak English intelligibly (I had some TAs who barely spoke the King’s or had thick, undecipherable accents). It was the large lecture classes that I found to be next to useless and boring. Unfortunately, you get those large classes at both public and private universities. If I had to do it again, I’d go to an LAC like my kids do today, not to avoid TAs, to avoid large classes and lectures.</p>
<p>I was a PhD student TA in a private school, teaching MBAs. I even made faculty honor roll for my high evaluations (but the PhD students invariably had higher evaluations than the faculty). That is not at all unusual. </p>
<p>PhD students typically need teaching experience before going on the academic job market and any top private school cares very much about the success of their PhD students. </p>
<p>The distinction between TAs and professors is blown out of proportion, as is the distinction between assistant professors and full professors and between sessional instructors and tenure-track professors (and I say that as a tenured professor with 20 years experience). There are MANY reasons for why less seasoned or less permanent professors often outperform their more experienced counterparts.</p>
<p>@Plainsman</p>
<p>That’s perfectly fine. I was just saying that I don’t like it when people who don’t go to these universities tell me how they are run.</p>
<p>I don’t think that my son has had any TAs do more than lead one or two classes per semester and it was usually when the professor couldn’t make the class for one reason or another. I think that he had more issues with adjuncts as they usually didn’t have office hours.</p>
<p>All I’m going to say is that all your college professors we’re graduate students or TA’s at one time or another. I don’t think it’s a bad idea for them to do teaching as well because it is how they become better professors in the future.</p>
<p>It is very important to have thorough knowledge about liberal arts colleges… I just went through [Liberal</a> Arts Colleges: Guide to Liberal Arts Degrees](<a href=“http://www.liberalartscolleges.org%5DLiberal”>http://www.liberalartscolleges.org)… it just gives good idea about the colleges…</p>
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<p>…But not all graduate students will become college professors. The point being that you expect a tenured professor to have a greater mastery of the field (and certainly his niche) than the average TA; stumbling upon a TA that will become a top professor is coincidental. </p>
<p>People like to say that the tenured (or even associate/assistant) professors are too focused on research or they don’t care as much. Maybe. But it’s not like the Ph.D student is any less engrossed in his or her own research and work. They’re not planning to exclusively teach postdoc–for most grad students that would be failure–so they focus on what they care about. The only difference is that the tenured professor has been doing this for 20 years, and has detailed lesson plans developed over 40 semesters. </p>
<p>After 4 years at a big state U, I expect TA’s (in my mostly quant classes) to lay a weaker foundation and basically just attack the key equations. Probably because they’ve been learning or researching advanced material for 10 years, but they’ve only been teaching for 1-2 years.</p>
<p>Regardless of whether you’re a grad student or professor, there’s a huge disparity (in difficulty and depth) between what you focus on for 36++ hours a week and what you teach for the remaining 4 hours of the week. The only difference is that the professor often has the experience to go through the simple stuff step by step so an undergrad can understand.</p>
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<p>OMG! A really horrible and misleading representation of liberal arts colleges, Shineyaa. I don’t know if you actually believe it or if you are being snarky. With only one or two exceptions, most of those at your link are online, unknown, or commercial, for-profit colleges. If that list is what you think of when you think of liberal arts colleges, then you have a great misunderstanding of liberal arts colleges. </p>
<p>You’re on CC. Do yourself a favor. Take a look at CC’s list of top liberal arts colleges, and then compare it to the totally misleading list that you provided: <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/cc-top-liberal-arts-colleges/[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/cc-top-liberal-arts-colleges/</a> </p>
<p>You can also go here: <a href=“http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/liberal-arts[/url]”>http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/liberal-arts</a></p>
<p>A friend’s daughter is at Colorado College and had a class taught by a graduate student from the University of Washington! They are full pay; she was thrilled.</p>