<p>I felt, as an undergrad, that it was mostly a positive thing to have the grad students around. It’s useful to be able to see a vision of what you could be in a few years, and to talk to a friendly approximate-peer about what academia, and the practice of your area of study, are really like. It’s useful to be able to talk to someone who was where you are only a few years before and get that kind of perspective on whatever you are going through at the moment. It meant that there was more of a research enterprise going on for me to participate in as an undergrad. And having grad student TAs meant that I had two, or many, instructors that I could go to for help, instead of just one, and that I got to hear material presented in multiple ways.</p>
<p>
Before dismissing claims of TA teaching out of hand, keep in mind that Berkeley, Michigan, Columbia, and others are NOT typical universities. They are elite research universities designed to crank out scholars and research. To that end, their graduate students get the red carpet much more than those at less selective or less known universities. </p>
<p>I have a friend in the anthropology department at Kansas and another in the history program at U Memphis, and both report that graduate students are regularly expected to to teach at least one course on top of a full courseload. Furthermore, none of the professors have regular office hours, library and computing facilities are limited and fought over, advising is virtually nonexistent, and introductory courses are exceedingly large.</p>
<p>The OP referred to Stanford and Columbia, but let’s not lose sight of the larger picture.</p>
<p>“He was one of about 500 students in one social sciences course led by a junior faculty member whose lectures, Mr. Billings said, were “disorganized, repetitive and incredibly reductive.””</p>
<p>If this guy was majoring in German and Classics, then this course must have been a Core…in other words, he chose to take it, he had other options, and he didn’t have to commit to staying in the course until he’d attended lecture for two weeks or more. If after all that he ended up in a class he found crappy, it’s his own fault. (And is it really surprising that a Rhodes Scholar might be way ahead of a junior faculty member in a course or two?)</p>
<p>I’m also struck by the fact that this guy found exactly two courses to criticize out of the 32 (or likely more) he took at Harvard. So based on his own experience, about 94% of his classes had excellent teachers, but he thinks that’s outside the norm. He may be a Rhodes Scholar, but I can’t rely on his guesses about his classmates’ experiences…let’s hear from THEM.</p>
<p>I don’t disagree that it’s possible to coast at Harvard, take the big lectures for 50% or more of your classes, never talk to your professors, and have a lackluster academic experience. But frankly, to the extent students are doing that, it’s either because they’re totally wrapped up in a big EC (which is fine with me), or because admissions recruited the wrong student. Harvard is for pro-active people who affirmatively seek what they want. If that’s not you, it’s not the right school for you, no matter how talented you are.</p>
<p>I never even worked “with” a graduate student, forget about for him/her. Four undergraduates across two labs ran our own project, answering directly to two PIs (one for each lab/discipline). That’s the norm at Brown, even as freshman or sophomore researchers and it’s a part of why I wanted to be at a unversity with some, but not a dominating graduate presence.</p>
<p>IB, </p>
<p>:confused:</p>
<p>Read post 20.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Ok, fine, then Instead of just relying on the opinions of students, let’s also examine some of the opinions of Harvard administrators. </p>
<p>* [Former Harvard President Derek] Bok calls academia “the only professional system that doesn’t instruct its newcomers in how to do what they will spend most of their time doing.” The problem, he believes, is institutional: Nobody teaches professors how to teach. New professors–often young and overworked–are assumed to know instinctively how to lead a classroom. So they teach the only way they know how: the way they themselves were taught. This creates a fundamentally conservative bias in the world of pedagogy.</p>
<p>This might be less problematic if we knew that the old ways were effective. But colleges refuse to accurately measure the effectiveness of specific teaching methods–leaving the instructors unable to improve the methods that aren’t working. Bok notes, for instance, that the lecture remains by far the most common way to present students with information, even though according to two separate cited studies, the average student is unable to recall most of the factual content of a typical lecture 15 minutes after the end of class. The result is that students often leave college little smarter than when they arrived: According to another revealing study, a student who starts in the 50th percentile of an entering class rises only to the 69th percentile when compared to entering students at the time he graduates.</p>
<p>Bok goes out of his way to commend teachers’ diligence. But though he is too diplomatic to say so explicitly unlike his predecessor as Harvard president, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the faculty deserves a share of the blame for poor teaching. Professors tend to believe, says Bok, that “teaching is an art that is either too simple to require formal preparation, too personal to be taught to others, or too innate to be conveyed to anyone lacking the necessary gift.” Thus, they rarely take steps to learn from one another, or to improve their methods–or even to consider the question of how to teach. When departments review their curricula, the focus is almost always on what should be required rather than how the required courses should be taught.</p>
<p>Even relatively minor tweaks in teaching style can significantly improve student performance. Bok tells the story of Harvard physicist Eric Mazur, who for years taught his introductory level physics course in the conventional way: He lectured, delivered lecture notes on the material, and left the rest to the assigned text books. Then he came across a 1985 study that tested students’ knowledge of the underlying principles of Newtonian physics–after they had just completed an introductory course on the subject. The study found that the students still had only minimal understanding of the basic principles at issue, and what they did learn, they had learned independently of classroom exercise. When Mazur administered the same test to his class, the results proved similar. *</p>
<p><a href=“http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1316/is_6_38/ai_n16608879/[/url]”>http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1316/is_6_38/ai_n16608879/</a></p>
<p>[Former Dean of Harvard College Harry] Lewis also has sharp words regarding the indifferent teaching that Harvard undergrads often encounter. He observes that “great teaching can be viewed in academic circles as a kind of performance art, fine if you can do it but raising doubts about the teacher’s seriousness as a scholar.” Harvard, like other research universities, pays very little attention to a professor’s ability to conduct a good class and pays inordinate attention to his publication record</p>
<p>[Excellence</a> Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education | The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy](<a href=“http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=1705]Excellence”>http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=1705)</p>
<p>*While Harvard’s teaching quality has often drawn fire from Harvard students, the task force’s work marks an unprecedented level of internal criticism from a group of senior professors.</p>
<p>The report paints a sobering picture of Harvard’s current teaching culture, in which effective classroom guidance is considered a matter of “individual talent, choice, or valor,” not something FAS sufficiently acknowledges or rewards.</p>
<p>“There are a lot of people who care intensely about teaching, but a lot of those same people think the institution doesn’t care,” Skocpol said in an interview yesterday.</p>
<p>Proven skill in teaching is ignored or even stigmatized during FAS performance reviews, according to the report.</p>
<p>“Every teaching award earns a warning of how I should not wander off research,” the report quotes an anonymous Ph.D. candidate as saying.</p>
<p>Senior professors quoted in the report voiced the same concerns, worrying that a focus on teaching may prove detrimental to their younger colleagues’ careers.</p>
<p>“There are still pockets of the University where winning the Levenson award for teaching as a junior faculty member is considered the kiss of death with respect to promotion,” the report quotes one anonymous senior professor as saying.</p>
<p>The result, according to the report, is that Harvard’s academic offerings can alienate students instead of engaging them.</p>
<p>“Concluding in turn that many faculty are not really interested in them, too many of our undergraduates take a passive stance toward the classroom and turn their passions toward extracurricular pursuits,” the report reads.
*</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2007/1/24/report-faculty-pay-should-be-linked/[/url]”>http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2007/1/24/report-faculty-pay-should-be-linked/</a></p>
<p>^not to mention Harvard really has no incentive to change. Harvard is still going to have #1 yield regardless. other schools may lose out cross-admit battles because of alleged bad teaching but not Harvard.</p>
<p>
Of course the institution doesn’t care. Research discoveries and awards bring academic recognition and distinction to a university…a collection of great teachers doesn’t. Every university has some great teachers, most good teachers and some really bad teachers.</p>
<p>When you start with the smartest cohort of kids in the country, how much do they need to rely on having great teachers for every class?</p>
<p>modestmelody, I was under the impression that graduate students teach undergrads some intro-level classes at Brown…classes such as intro to Calculus or foreign languages.</p>
<p>Alexandre,
When I was at WashU and NU, I didn’t see any grad student lecturing for intro classes during the regular academic year, i.e. fall and spring semesters. The grad students led the discussion sections only. However, some summer classes were taught by grad students at both schools.</p>
<p>
Not sure where in my post about research experiences I mentioned course instruction. Three kinds of classes at Brown may have sections led by graduate students-- introductory courses in Literary Arts, the second and third semester of calculus, and foreon language (led by native speakers). I’ve written about the rigorus requirements to teach language at Brown and I’m not goin to type that out again from my iPhone. In math, you are free to enroll in a faulty member’s section instead with little or no difficulty.</p>
<p>I don’t think graduate instructors are inherently bad if they’re not overused, assigned intelligently, and have significant oversight and professional development opportunities. The miniscule percentage of classes at Brown meet these conditions, as I’m sure courses as many, but not all schools do.</p>
<p>None of this has any bearing on my comment, which had to do with my seeking a particular lab/research environment as a major factor when I did my college search. My desire for a mentoring relationship with a PI who led the lab in which I worked had nothing to do with the derogatory hand-holding, I’m tough enough to teach myself, attitude of UCB.</p>
<p>
Yes, I saw it and caught the “elite” in the post, so I appreciate the differentiation. Still, there is often generalization on here…like others, I am a fan of the top publics, but not all universities (private or public) are set up so nicely.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Despite alleged “weak” and “inadequate” advising, Harvard and Stanford students continue to win a disproportionate share of the most prestigious post-graduate scholarships, get into the most selective graduate and professional schools in the country, get some of the most elite jobs in the world, etc.</p>
<p>So either their advising is not “weak” and “inadequate,” or good advising is overrated…</p>
<p>
I think the “% of classes under 20” stat is subject to misinterpretation. If we were to look more closely at those classes with less than 20 students, I strongly suspect that the average size of a “small” class at Williams or Amherst would be significantly smaller than the average size of a “small” class at Harvard or Columbia.</p>
<p>For example, tutorials at Williams are capped at an enrollment of 2. From the standpoint of the “classes < 20” statistic, a 2-student tutorial at Williams is no different from a 19-student tutorial at a university.</p>
<p>But if you were really in those classes, you would notice a difference.</p>
<p>
You referring to the school or me?</p>
<p>
props to you for texting this on a phone…it would have taken my large fingers about 45 minutes to write what you posted.</p>
<p>
2 students?! Sounds like an inefficient use of resources to me.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That’s the least you should get for having to explain for the rest of your lives that you didn’t go to, say, UMass Amherst or Cal Poly Pomona…</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This is awesome.</p>
<p>“Three kinds of classes at Brown may have sections led by graduate students-- introductory courses in Literary Arts, the second and third semester of calculus, and foreign language (led by native speakers).”</p>
<p>This is the same as at Harvard, substituting Expos for Literary Arts.</p>
<p>The fact that a university isn’t emphasizing teaching enough in its faculty reviews (and views that as a problem it is working on) doesn’t mean that the teachers suck – especially given the immense freedom Harvard undergrads have to select their own instructors. Every undergrad at Harvard should be exercising that freedom, or they will unquestionably lose out to students who do.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This suggests to me there’s room for another kind of “misinterpretation” of the “under 20 students” stat at schools that offer tutorials. </p>
<p>The Chronicle of Higher Education describes Williams’ tutorials as follows: “While each session has just two students, the tutor officially has 10 students per semester. The professor separates them into five pairs and meets separately with each group. That means five hours a week in the same class – more than most courses – but professors have to do little preparation other than creating the course and writing the syllabus.”</p>
<p>[Williams</a> College Tutorial Program](<a href=“Williams College”>Williams College)</p>
<p>But there’s ambiguity as to how to count and report that kind of class: is it a single, 5-hour-per-week, 10-person class (as it apparently is for Williams’ internal housekeeping purposes, i.e., for purposes of determining how much teaching is credited to the tutor); or should it instead count as five 2-person classes? Many schools that offer tutorials report them under the latter method, in effect keeping 2 sets of books, one for their own internal (and more honest) accounting purposes, and another for purposes of making themselves look good in US News. I have no idea whether Williams is in this category, but it’s easy to see how some schools can inflate their reported percentages of small classes through this kind of bookkeeping chicanery. Indeed, it’s been reported that some schools have gone to a tutorial model precisely with the aim to increase their reported percentage of small classes, as part of a calculated strategy to improve their US News rankings at every turn. (I’m not suggesting Williams is in this category; I really have no idea what motivated their adoption of the tutorial method 15 years ago, but Williams is a very good school and unless proven otherwise I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt). The professor would do just as much work, probably more, teaching a 5 hour-per-week, 10-person course or seminar, but the school gets to report 5 times as many small classes while actually reducing the professor’s workload if it breaks the group of 10 up into five 2-person tutorials in which each student gets only 1 hour of actual class time per week.</p>
<p>This is not to criticize the tutorial as a pedagogical method; there’s much to be said in its favor. But it does suggest there’s a lot of squishiness in the so-called “objective” statistics relied upon by US News, and consequently ample room for manipulation.</p>