<p>I've heard that some universities undergraduates are taught by graduate students, instead of actual professors. Which do you prefer and why?</p>
<p>Disadvanteges and advanteges of this teaching ( professor or graduate student).
List of schools that fit each criteria.</p>
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<p>This also brings to question, are some schools better with undergraduates than others...?</p>
<p>I apologize for lifting this from a different thread, but it seems very relevant here-</p>
<p>The point about TA's being inferior to faculty in teaching is naive. TAs are PhD students who take responsibility for a section or couple sections from a course in their specialty. This is often, but not always, a requirement of the graduate degree. TAs will be close to your age and not yet jaded by the system. They will have a passion for their field (as witnessed by their willingness to spend 5 to 10 years pursuing a degree that results in very little in the way of job prospects, simply so they can expand the existing knowledge surrounding an interesting topic.) TA's often have a choice about which class they want to teach.</p>
<p>A faculty member oversees all of the TA's for a course and delivers the lectures. For a faculty member, teaching undergraduate courses is the least desirable of all of their service duties. For this reason, universities will often hire adjuncts (part time people) to deliver lectures or force the not yet tenured assistant professors into it. Overall, it is treated with quite a bit of disdain, and it is said that winning a teaching award is a death knell for the careers of young professors.</p>
<p>When you get to more advanced coursework, TA's are less common. These are often taught by a rotating group of professors eg. each professor speaks about his area of expertise for one or two lectures. Or the course will be a staple that is always taught by the same individual who no longer runs his own research operations.</p>
<p>You may find that you can relate better and gain more from your experiences with a TA, particularly in the earlier courses, than with a professor. Also keep in mind that aside from the TAing requirement, PhD students don't have any formal teaching experience so it is not like a professor would have gained teaching training that way.</p>
<p>All who I have spoke to said it was a disadvantage to have a TA, for the professor may be a better lecture in teaching... while you may find the TA just as stumbled on the course as you. I guess TA's quaility would vary depending on the university?
You've seem to have explain it in a little more positive view for me, which was the first time I heard such.</p>
<p>You will probably relate better to a TA than to a disinterested prof--but you'd also probably relate best to a professor who is actually interested in teaching. They do exist, mainly at LACs where teaching is helpful, not harmful, to tenure.</p>
<p>Right, I see.</p>
<p>I think the myth that professors are better than TAs comes from misunderstandings about the way the TA system works.</p>
<p>TAs are always Ph.D students in the field who have completed much in the area that you're studying and are studying it at a higher level in the doctoral program at the school. Just like belevitt says, they are often dedicated to the field, are passionate about the subject, are conducting research into the subject and therefore have some first-hand knowledge besides just the book, and are always overseen by faculty members.</p>
<p>Either way, a beginning assistant professor may have the same amount, or less, experience than TAs have. Professors don't go through teacher training like K-12 teachers do. It is assumed that if you do good research, you can teach a class on your research. This, of course, is not true. I have a very brilliant statistician at my school with whom I took a class last semester and he is not a good teacher. Great man, lots of good one-on-one stats help -- not a good teacher. He teaches way over everyone's heads.</p>
<p>However, now I have a TA (in a graduate class) and she's awesome. She makes the statistics easy to understand, she helps us with the code for the programs, and her enthusiasm for statistics is infectious. She's just great.</p>
<p>The only thing I can say is that TAs don't always stop in upper-level classes. I'm in a doctoral program right now and 3 out of my 4 graduate-level courses have TAs. In some classes they do mainly administrative tasks like e-mail the entire class, post the readings, etc. but in others they meet with students for office hours, lead discussion/lab sections, and here the summer courses in my department and some of our famous Core Curriculum courses are taught by advanced (4+ year) TAs. They are all experienced, and they are good teachers, sometimes better than the distracted researcher-professors they replace.</p>
<p>The OP is talking about a PhD student as the instructor of record in a course, not TAing. This happens all the time, and I did it as a PhD student / candidate. I'd teach a class of 50 students, walk out with my backpack, and walk into a class I was taking. This isn't the same as recitation and is actually fairly common. Usually the students have no idea their instructor is a PhD student unless they go to his/her office hours and wonder why their professor shares an office and has cutouts of Piled Higher Deeper on his office wall.</p>
<p>Schools do this because increasingly universities want to hire someone they can put directly into the classroom. As a result, they want to see teaching scores. The only way to get that is to be the instructor of record. Not all degrees have post-doc positions, and even those that do are seeing the number of post-docs decrease substantially.</p>
<p>For a survey course (such as "statistics" or "intro to..."), you likely won't see any difference in quality. A post-comps doctoral student is almost indistinguishable from an assistant professor. Neither have a lot of time (one on the "clock" and the other on the dissertation), both have a firm grasp of the relevant concepts, and both should be deep entrenched in the latest research, allowing them to present the state of the art. The biggest difference is that one makes fives times what the other makes.</p>
<p>At a higher level, it does make a difference, though. If you're taking a specialized course (say, advanced reactor kinetics), it's much more beneficial to receive instruction from someone with 20 years of reactor kinetics research, as opposed to someone with 3 years. The depth of knowledge will be different (though, for some reason, it's always the new faculty that are asked to teach seminars).</p>
<p>From a mechanics perspective, some say PhD students give higher GPAs (they're more lenient because they're also students), and some say that PhD students are more difficult (they have a skewed expectation based on their own courses), so it goes both ways.</p>
<p>@Keilexandra, absolutely right. This is inborn problem of research institutions and may be quite different at liberal arts colleges or universities that lack a focus on research.</p>
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Which do you prefer and why?
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<p>No blanket answer to this. There are good and bad prof teachers, and good and bad grad student teachers.</p>
<p>The obvious disadvantage to a grad student teaching a class is that a grad school recommendation from them will be held in less esteem by faculty at target universities.</p>
<p>The obvious advantage to a grad student over a prof working toward tenure is that the grad student isn't distracted by the tenure rat race.</p>
<p>The obvious advantage to a grad student in general is that unless the class is in the professor's specialty, the grad student's knowledge of the subject is likely to be more recent and up-to-date.</p>
<p>At Rutgers, TA's sometimes care way more than the professors in the 101-201 level courses. So I would take a great TA over a decent Professor. But in the 300-400 level courses, give me a professor because the classes are going to be 20x smaller than the lower level classes, literally.</p>
<p>Thanks for the views, more is welcome.</p>