No, I don't have the wrong number of digits there, or perhaps you missed the line "depending of course on the particular program costs and requirements of the school."
International students pay the full tuition amount and are generally illegible for any kind of financial aid or scholarships. It's incredibly expensive.
What "random lottery" are you talking about?
At public colleges maybe? My wife and I think pretty much every international student at my college paid something like 50% tuition and were eligible for academic and sports scholarships.
No, I don't have the wrong number of digits there, or perhaps you missed the line "depending of course on the particular program costs and requirements of the school."
International students pay the full tuition amount and are generally illegible for any kind of financial aid or scholarships. It's incredibly expensive.
What "random lottery" are you talking about?
At public colleges maybe? My wife and I think pretty much every international student at my college paid something like 50% tuition and were eligible for academic and sports scholarships.
International students are eligible for scholarships at private institutions and athletic scholarships anywhere. They are ineligible for any money coming from the govt which is a sizable chunk of the money at a public school.
With regards to the other discussion going on, I think it is far easier for most people to proceduralize concepts when they are applying the concepts involved to a familiar set of facts. Otherwise you are likely going to waste half the class time going over the same basic set of facts every class in order to get to the real lecture with everybody still on the same page.
Kistra on
Animal Crossing: City Folk Lissa in Filmore 3179-9580-0076
As to memorization and all that jazz, memorizing certain facts can certainly be useful. I have a really strong memory when it comes to figures, and in virtually every job I've ever held, I've gotten hefty benefit out of memorizing some of the more common numbers I've come across, be it the price of a small fry and drink to the ID numbers on contracts I'm juggling as project manager. The capacity for memorization is extremely useful, and I don't think memorizing facts and figures in itself is a bad thing, and should be encouraged, as long as it's in conjunction with understanding what the hell it is you're memorizing.
I don't think detail memorization is inherently a bad thing at all. It's a natural outgrowth of working with specific information over and over again.
The problem comes when you're actually trying to educate someone. An education built around detail memorization is not going to prepare the student for dealing with a fast changing employment environment, especially given the advent of internet searches for gathering information. Unfortunately, the memorization and restatement of facts is exactly where we're headed with the current push for standardized testing.
Which is one reason our education system is terrible.
Yes.
Though I have seen some people go a little overboard to avoid having kids memorize anything, even though memorization is, in itself, a useful skill. Things like not having kids learn multiplication tables, even though being able to recall instantly that 9x7=63 is a) a useful fact in its own right, and b) necessary to know if you want to actually multiply larger numbers without a calculator.
Which is another reason our education system is terrible - too many people are draconically for or against the Dogma of the Week, without ever trying moderation and multiple teaching methods.
Basically, people suck.
ElJeffe on
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
I absolutely think kids should memorise more, especially when they're young. That's because it makes your memory better. You still lose things you don't use over time, but you can retain a lot more, for a lot longer. It makes learning and doing stuff so much easier and less stressful that I wonder what the hell is wrong with people who deny this. I can only assume that either their memories are naturally so good that they don't appreciate their advantage, or they're just inured to doing everything the hard way.
The problem with people who depend entirely on calculators and computer simulations is that they can't tell when their calcs are feeding them bullshit. You don't have to be a total expert in whatever math you're doing, but you need to have at least a basic grasp of what's going on under the hood. Same goes for chemistry, yes you do damn well need to be able to recall properties of elements if you want to be able to grasp how they'll behave under different conditions.
Has it been mentioned that east Asia has drastically different ideas of what constitutes knowledge and reference, and much different ideas of intellectual property?
Even Europe freely allows things that we would consider plagiarism.
This was my job for three years, basically. I saw mistakes like the op describes a lot.
I absolutely think kids should memorise more, especially when they're young. That's because it makes your memory better. You still lose things you don't use over time, but you can retain a lot more, for a lot longer. It makes learning and doing stuff so much easier and less stressful that I wonder what the hell is wrong with people who deny this. I can only assume that either their memories are naturally so good that they don't appreciate their advantage, or they're just inured to doing everything the hard way.
Can you cite some sort of literature to back this up? Because it's not really backed up by anything I've read on the subject.
People who actively work to understand their own ability to retain information can better manage how and what they actually remember (this is referred to as "metacognition"), but I've never seen anything indicative of early life memorization clearing out more space for future things to be memorized.
...I'm pretty sure that one's a given, but I'll go hunting after work. Again though, its not the only tool in the teaching toolbox. Memorisation exercises, the metacognitive stuff you're talking about, puzzle-solving, repetitive puzzle solving, group discussions, argumentation, etc all feed in to helping your brain work better. I just really don't believe in skipping the basic 'x does y' stuff because lolcomputerswilldoallourthinking.
...I'm pretty sure that one's a given, but I'll go hunting after work. Again though, its not the only tool in the teaching toolbox. Memorisation exercises, the metacognitive stuff you're talking about, puzzle-solving, repetitive puzzle solving, group discussions, argumentation, etc all feed in to helping your brain work better. I just really don't believe in skipping the basic 'x does y' stuff because lolcomputerswilldoallourthinking.
I don't think anyone is advocating skipping multiplication tables because calculators exist. At least anyone here.
As to the enhanced ability to memorize thing, that really sounds like a mild misunderstanding of metacognition. There isn't actually more space created, but the more practice you have at collating the information that comes in, the more efficiently and effectively it will be networked.
You don't necessarily remember more, you just have better access to more of what you remember, via stronger networks and a more ordered system of connections.
has anyone mentioned that it is possible this foreign student thought she could get away with doing this simply because she is foreign? She could have been thinking to herself all along, oh if I get caught I can just play stupid like I didn't know. I know there a lot of people out there who like to play dumb.
This is my personal rant against my school's engineering students:
As a chem major, I often take classes that are filled to the brim with engineering students who could absolutely care less about the classes because they have little to no real GPA standards. So, they talk through my physics and math classes like there is no tomorrow. They also have a huge copy network, whether it be for homework or assignments. It gets to the point that professors have to switch up tests to prevent the engineering students from totally cheating. At one point, they were copying entire tests onto their formula sheets.
In my calc class, I overheard one engineering student talking about how he can always bump his exam grade up by erasing portions, rewriting them correctly, then accusing the professor of misgrading his exam.
I have to learn this stuff to be able to be a competent chemist, and there are people around me not even willing to do the bare minimum. It is very frustrating, and frankly, our universities shouldn't be rewarding these special types of people with degrees and jobs.
...I'm pretty sure that one's a given, but I'll go hunting after work. Again though, its not the only tool in the teaching toolbox. Memorisation exercises, the metacognitive stuff you're talking about, puzzle-solving, repetitive puzzle solving, group discussions, argumentation, etc all feed in to helping your brain work better. I just really don't believe in skipping the basic 'x does y' stuff because lolcomputerswilldoallourthinking.
I don't think anyone is advocating skipping multiplication tables because calculators exist. At least anyone here.
As to the enhanced ability to memorize thing, that really sounds like a mild misunderstanding of metacognition. There isn't actually more space created, but the more practice you have at collating the information that comes in, the more efficiently and effectively it will be networked.
You don't necessarily remember more, you just have better access to more of what you remember, via stronger networks and a more ordered system of connections.
Yeah. I'm not suggesting that memorization is either bad or entirely unhelpful but I feel it is much more important to learn how to do something than to learn this data -> this result.
Memorization is important; it provides a basis for scaffolding. Instilling knowledge for future use gives students a factual foundation for how something works. Teachers can then rely on this knowledge to help students develop more critical approaches to material.
Generally, low level university courses exist to provide a factual foundation for later development. You'll take Astronomy 101 and learn about false-color images for star counting or reading spectroscopy lines for hydrogen but then by astronomy 250 you'll be setting up a telescope to image a portion of the sky and then zero in on a star to use spectral analysis to determine its elemental makeup. You'll learn about the basic evolution of countries and the creation of major historical figures in history 101, so that you can more closely follow causes and events in the Middle ages in history 204 so you can learn about specific events regarding the crusades in history 309 so you can write your own paper with a wealth of source material and background in history 401.
This thread has an awkward train of thought implying that every college paper is or should be about original ideas and research. Most lower level college classes are proving you can analyze and synthesize information; that you've "mastered the basics" and are actually capable of producing reliable, usable information in higher level classes. This is, in fact, one of the benefits of a traditional 4 year university over a technical college or associates degree: you need to take courses in other disciplines to expand your knowledge base. You may never use that ability to distinguish different types of minerals you got in geology 105, but maybe it will help you describe geologic processes on Io for your high-level astronomy seminar's paper.
On being an international student:
Getting accepted to a campus as a non-native speaker can be an intimidating and stressful experience. But that doesn't really permit poor language skills - especially for written work done outside of class. I've been there. I know I've built incomprehensible sentences while in class, but my written work was goddamn immaculate. I had people say they thought it was written by a native speaker because I put the time in to make sure it was coherent and grammatically sound.
Usually international students take their opportunity overseas very seriously. Studying abroad is an expensive proposition that usually grabs a student's full academic attention (there may be parties, but if they need to complete an assignment, they make time). Occasionally students may be overburdened by having to due research assistant work outside of class, but usually professors are well aware of that sort of load on students (and it tends to be more prevalent for graduate exchange students).
But there are occasionally outliers who are there for a free ride (particularly with parts of the US's reptuation abroad as an easy ride).
On citing sources and plagiarism:
By the time I was nearing the end of my undergrad, I basically had to provide a citation for any time I used an idea from a source (this resulted in lots of "Ibid., [page number]" citations). In other cases and disciplines, students are only expected to directly cite quotations and provide a list of works consulted at the end. Unless you're building a research project with a literature review, most science classes don't have much in the way of bibliographies.
Citations outside the Anglosphere are ...unstandardized. In the US there are heaps of different citation styles based on your field or the general disposition of the written work. In many countries this sort of distinction doesn't exist. They may not even have a standardized way to make citations. Plagiarism as we understand it is pretty different from other parts of the world outside the Anglosphere (and there the US and Canada tend to be more strict than the UK and friends). At universities in the US, my course syllabi had plagiarims notices; one university had an expansive student handbook that was "mandatory reading" (i.e. nobody read it) that covered plagiarism. Abroad I had professors tell me to cite my sources, but no explicit mention of plagiarism.
University students around the globe are generally aware of intellectual property rights on some level, although they're generally not emphasized as heavily as the US. Keep in mind that Taiwan does not function the same as China; it tends to be closer to the US way of thinking - and even students from China are aware of copying intellectual material.
...Also, people in this thread seem to have a lot of TAs. I had ...maybe 3 throughout my entire undergrad.
Memorization is important; it provides a basis for scaffolding. Instilling knowledge for future use gives students a factual foundation for how something works. Teachers can then rely on this knowledge to help students develop more critical approaches to material.
Generally, low level university courses exist to provide a factual foundation for later development. You'll take Astronomy 101 and learn about false-color images for star counting or reading spectroscopy lines for hydrogen but then by astronomy 250 you'll be setting up a telescope to image a portion of the sky and then zero in on a star to use spectral analysis to determine its elemental makeup. You'll learn about the basic evolution of countries and the creation of major historical figures in history 101, so that you can more closely follow causes and events in the Middle ages in history 204 so you can learn about specific events regarding the crusades in history 309 so you can write your own paper with a wealth of source material and background in history 401.
This is all very true. Some level of factual understanding is crucial to being able to approach a subject in a scholarly manner.
The problem we wind up with, though, is when we never push students past that factual understanding and on to more expert-like behavior regarding the information. It's a major problem we have here in the United States in our schools, and there are a lot of people pushing to make it even worse. Because factual knowledge, regardless of the ability to actually use it, is very easy to measure via tests, and to (apparently) objectively apply as a standard with which to judge teacher effectiveness. Expert-like behavior and critical thinking, which should be the true goals of education in my opinion, is very hard to measure on any but the most superficial level.
Unfortunately, we've got a lot of people with no background in education or cognitive science making a lot of incredibly bad calls when it comes to our school system, and other people cheering them on to do it.
I have to learn this stuff to be able to be a competent chemist, and there are people around me not even willing to do the bare minimum. It is very frustrating, and frankly, our universities shouldn't be rewarding these special types of people with degrees and jobs.
They may get a degree, but if they can't handle Calculus there's no way they're going to be able to hold down an engineering job of any kind. At least I hope not, otherwise I'm wasting a lot of my time...
I hated memorizing basic math when I was younger (and now I've started an engineering major! life is strange), but I find it appalling how difficult it is for so many people to do simple math in their head. People can't even take 20% of a round number at my work, what the hell. I'm not sure if that's because they never bothered to memorize simple math, or if they memorized it and then forgot it, so the concept of moving a decimal place to get 10% is beyond the pale. I did recently see that study that found a huge percentage of US students don't understand what the equals sign means, but that appeared to partially be because they're treating real life like a calculator.
Memorization is important; it provides a basis for scaffolding. Instilling knowledge for future use gives students a factual foundation for how something works. Teachers can then rely on this knowledge to help students develop more critical approaches to material.
Generally, low level university courses exist to provide a factual foundation for later development. You'll take Astronomy 101 and learn about false-color images for star counting or reading spectroscopy lines for hydrogen but then by astronomy 250 you'll be setting up a telescope to image a portion of the sky and then zero in on a star to use spectral analysis to determine its elemental makeup. You'll learn about the basic evolution of countries and the creation of major historical figures in history 101, so that you can more closely follow causes and events in the Middle ages in history 204 so you can learn about specific events regarding the crusades in history 309 so you can write your own paper with a wealth of source material and background in history 401.
This is all very true. Some level of factual understanding is crucial to being able to approach a subject in a scholarly manner.
The problem we wind up with, though, is when we never push students past that factual understanding and on to more expert-like behavior regarding the information. It's a major problem we have here in the United States in our schools, and there are a lot of people pushing to make it even worse. Because factual knowledge, regardless of the ability to actually use it, is very easy to measure via tests, and to (apparently) objectively apply as a standard with which to judge teacher effectiveness. Expert-like behavior and critical thinking, which should be the true goals of education in my opinion, is very hard to measure on any but the most superficial level.
Unfortunately, we've got a lot of people with no background in education or cognitive science making a lot of incredibly bad calls when it comes to our school system, and other people cheering them on to do it.
Well, a lot of education is purely reactionary. People keep trying to "fix" what's broken by patching up the things that didn't work for them, but very few seem to actually have a concrete vision of how education should work from top-down. That is, I feel, one of the reasons education gets polarized, as ElJeffe suggested, into these dogmatic camps. There's no ability to perform broad-based research free of context, or even in multiple contexts. A study of like 30 students is considered big, while in computational biology, most of us won't even look at a study if it has fewer than several hundred individuals. It's all "This is what I've experienced personally, so this is what I feel, so this is what I'm going to do." I've worked with high school students whose teachers are entirely "See what I'm doing on the board, copy it down, repeat it yourself" and other teachers who are entirely "No, you don't need to actually know anything, because you can look it all up on the Internet or copy the formulas out of the book!" and while they're both shitty teachers, the former is much more readily identified as such, whereas the latter are somehow considered modern, cool, and effective... when really all they do is pass the pedagogical buck on to the next teacher, because their students often pass their class having retained nothing.
But I'll note that even people in education are often shitty horrible people. At my local faculty of education, I took a course called something like Gender Equality in Education, and the prof - female, tenured, former department head - had us do a reading from Louise Brizendine's The Female Brain. If you haven't read/heard of this book y'all, I can repost a rant I've made about it before, but it is utter and complete sexist tripe, having been labeled "pseudoscience" by Science and is in itself a plagiarized/fabricated work, because many of the references are entirely without content (and have been denied by the referenced authors).
So I'm sitting there, a student with a significant biology and women's studies background, and the prof does not even mention any of the many many factual errors in our reading alone. And all the other freaking teacher candidates are arts majors and they're just nodding and soaking it all up, because hell if they took grade 11 biology and know what a Barr body is (No, women do not receive a "double-dose" of the X-chromosome.). I ended up transferring out of that class after filing a complaint, but the prof wouldn't even acknowledge the pages of background research I presented her. And now, that shit's actually taken hold in the education system around here, with the TDSB president trying to pilot boys-only and girls-only schools, because "boys and girls learn differently". (Rejected by the school board parental trustees, ironically.)
I've had several other horrific experiences with people with extensive research and practical backgrounds in education, and suffice it to say, I really don't consider that a qualification for anything any more, except for the ability to say "pedagogical".
People with tons of experience and qualifications certainly can be wrong about important aspects of their area of expertise.
I think the difference is that people without that experience or qualifications will be wrong about important aspects of the subject. Almost universally.
This is why the cult of the layman is so wantonly destructive.
People with tons of experience and qualifications certainly can be wrong about important aspects of their area of expertise.
I think the difference is that people without that experience or qualifications will be wrong about important aspects of the subject. Almost universally.
This is why the cult of the layman is so wantonly destructive.
Mmm, perhaps. I've seen a lot of TAs who are better than their professors. Would that count? :P
I also think you're establishing a false dichotomy. A lot of educators with tons of experience and qualifications end up far shittier than the layman, because all that experience has actually pushed them in the wrong direction. (See, professor who's been teaching for 50 years and hasn't updated his/her course and/or teaching style for just about the same length of time, but goes, "Well I've been teaching here for FIFTY years!" when criticized.)
And now, that shit's actually taken hold in the education system around here, with the TDSB president trying to pilot boys-only and girls-only schools, because "boys and girls learn differently". (Rejected by the school board parental trustees, ironically.)
While that book does look stupid, I do think that going to an all boys school helped me (to a certain extent). Subjective opinions!
People with tons of experience and qualifications certainly can be wrong about important aspects of their area of expertise.
I think the difference is that people without that experience or qualifications will be wrong about important aspects of the subject. Almost universally.
This is why the cult of the layman is so wantonly destructive.
Mmm, perhaps. I've seen a lot of TAs who are better than their professors. Would that count? :P
I also think you're establishing a false dichotomy. A lot of educators with tons of experience and qualifications end up far shittier than the layman, because all that experience has actually pushed them in the wrong direction. (See, professor who's been teaching for 50 years and hasn't updated his/her course and/or teaching style for just about the same length of time, but goes, "Well I've been teaching here for FIFTY years!" when criticized.)
This is happening to tons of purist chemistry professors.
Some still think slide rules and log tables should be used in courses!
They aren't willing to update their research to address the now integrated fields (physics, biology, and chemistry are colliding head on and creating some super neat areas of research), so they lose funding, sit on their tenured butts, and generally refuse to change.
People with tons of experience and qualifications certainly can be wrong about important aspects of their area of expertise.
I think the difference is that people without that experience or qualifications will be wrong about important aspects of the subject. Almost universally.
This is why the cult of the layman is so wantonly destructive.
Mmm, perhaps. I've seen a lot of TAs who are better than their professors. Would that count? :P
I also think you're establishing a false dichotomy. A lot of educators with tons of experience and qualifications end up far shittier than the layman, because all that experience has actually pushed them in the wrong direction. (See, professor who's been teaching for 50 years and hasn't updated his/her course and/or teaching style for just about the same length of time, but goes, "Well I've been teaching here for FIFTY years!" when criticized.)
I don't think it's a false dichotomy, but I'm speaking in much broader, more systematic terms than any given professor at a given university.
I'm talking about the people who are in charge of educational policy, at a local, state or national level. There seems to be a sort of sentiment that a complete layman is preferable in such a position to someone with experience or expertise in education, as evidenced by the people that keep getting elected to school boards that have no experience teaching or administrating schools and haven't even had a kid in the local public school.
For your example in particular, education unfortunately only provides additional tools to be used. Someone who has intentionally entrenched themselves in their paradigm from 50 years ago simply isn't going to benefit from any advancements in their field. This applies to mechanics and glassblowers just as much as it does educators, though. You just kind of hope educators know better, and they don't always.
I don't necessarily think laymen could do better. I just think most education "experts" suck so so bad that I don't bother even asking whether someone's a layman or not any more.
Had a guy from the local education faculty's physics department come in earlier this month to a CS education research. He complained that it's taken decades for physics teachers to finally realise the pedagogical value for clickers (those devices that let the class answer live MC questions... and it's really debatable whether they even have yet). Then he turned around and criticized the guest speaker for focusing only on CS education and redoing the same things that have already been done in other fields. Well, yeah... maybe because nobody fucking listens! The sheer irony of it practically bowled me over.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds.2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
0
Options
KakodaimonosCode fondlerHelping the 1% get richerRegistered Userregular
edited December 2010
In this case, I'd definitely run it up the flagpole with the professor and find out how he wants to deal with it. Personally, I'd probably give the student a warning and make them rewrite the paper using correct citation format.
Plagiarism is always fun in CS courses. When I was TAing data structures, I was somewhat lenient, since there's only so many ways someone can implement a linked list correctly. When things like variable names, indentation and line breaks matched? Then we had a problem. (And that was the reason why the professors in most CS courses didn't have formatting standards for coding, like most professional programming jobs require. Makes it easier to catch the copying.) Of course, after the students did their own implementation of the data structure, the next section would be "Here's how it's done in the STL libraries. 99% of the time, you can just use that one."
Kakodaimonos on
0
Options
AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
edited December 2010
Research work in college, especially at the undergrad level, is so far beyond irrelevant that it does shame to the word.
It's kids looking up things other people did, and then citing it in a paper that tells the reader nothing. Of all the "research" I did in 6 years of undergrad and post-grad, the only thing I ever learned from it all was how to properly format papers.
In an undergrad senior-level literature class I once took, my professor allowed for functionally illiterate people make good marks because they copied the formatting algorithm from the MLA handbook with few errors. Is this what's important these days? I spent tens of thousands of dollars and years off my life being taught how wide to make margins and how far from the top of the page I should place my header.
The Taiwanese girl probably was trying to cheat. Good for her.
Since we're discussing TAs, chemistry, and higher education, I'll share my little anecdote.
I TA'd two quarters last year in intro organic chemistry here - big class two sections of 350 each. I had three discussions of, nominally, ~30 students each. They weren't required to attend the assigned discussion or any discussion at all, or lecture in point of fact, since that's more or less impossible to administrate with 700 students. The first week I had ~25 students, the second I was down to ten, and after that I usually had between 0 and three show up for any given section. Whether that's because I'm a shitty TA or they didn't care is unclear. I favor the latter, but I'm biased.
Anyways, in interacting with the undergrads my biggest complaint is that many of them didn't want to think for themselves. They wanted rules they could memorize and make flow charts out of and generalities. That sort of approach really just doesn't work in organic chemistry; it's all situational. I don't know if it's because that's just what they'd had all their lives, but it's really frustrating when I get asked constantly, "is that always true?" or "will that be on the test?" I would always make them explain why they thought A was the answer, which I hoped would help a bit, but maybe not.
Another large part of it is that here, anyways, the majority of the kids are from the top 5-10% of their high-school classes. They're used to skating be without trying, then they get to college and they're just average and they don't know how to deal with that at first. I certainly didn't.
edit: re OT: Tell the prof, then it's his problem. I personally think she should get a second chance, with a grade penalty, but it's not up to you. CYA on this one.
I have found education phd students to be the most terrible at actually understanding education.
What are their specialties? I'm not familiar with any program that gives out just straight EDC PhDs.
Edit: Weird, I'm finding Education PhDs with google.
If I were to go on to a PhD at this institution, I'd have to specialize into Science or go Cognitive Science instead.
? Uh, yeah, faculties of education give out <degrees> of Education. I'm pretty sure that's the overwhelming norm, at least in North America.
See, I'm at a school that has Bachelors and Masters programs in Education, but not a PhD. If I wanted a PhD through here I'd have to specialize.
I guess I just assumed this was the norm due to my experience with people who have PhDs in Arts Education or Special Education. Learn something new every day.
They wanted rules they could memorize and make flow charts out of and generalities. That sort of approach really just doesn't work in organic chemistry; it's all situational. I don't know if it's because that's just what they'd had all their lives, but it's really frustrating when I get asked constantly, "is that always true?" or "will that be on the test?" I would always make them explain why they thought A was the answer, which I hoped would help a bit, but maybe not.
Out of curiosity... aren't there rules for organic chemistry nomenclature? I've been tutoring grade 12 chemistry students from a local high school for a couple years now, and their chemistry teacher never gives them the IUPAC nomenclature rules for organic compounds that I remember learning (like, carboxylic acid > aldehyde > ketone in terms of naming priority, or whatever) and then my students are completely and utterly confused as to how to name anything, because it seems entirely random, because... well, it's not like they've ever done anything with these chemicals before, and they're *just* learning organic chemistry for the very first time.
Re. TAs and plagiarism, here's another issue. If you have a course with 300 students, how do you divide up the marking among TAs who can only work ~50 hours each? If you split them up such that no single assignment/question is all marked entirely by one TA, plagiarism seems like it would be very difficult to catch. Is the marking that you guys do usually divided on a per question/assignment basis?
They wanted rules they could memorize and make flow charts out of and generalities. That sort of approach really just doesn't work in organic chemistry; it's all situational. I don't know if it's because that's just what they'd had all their lives, but it's really frustrating when I get asked constantly, "is that always true?" or "will that be on the test?" I would always make them explain why they thought A was the answer, which I hoped would help a bit, but maybe not.
Out of curiosity... aren't there rules for organic chemistry nomenclature? I've been tutoring grade 12 chemistry students from a local high school for a couple years now, and their chemistry teacher never gives them the IUPAC nomenclature rules for organic compounds that I remember learning (like, carboxylic acid > aldehyde > ketone in terms of naming priority, or whatever) and then my students are completely and utterly confused as to how to name anything, because it seems entirely random, because... well, it's not like they've ever done anything with these chemicals before, and they're *just* learning organic chemistry for the very first time.
Re. TAs and plagiarism, here's another issue. If you have a course with 300 students, how do you divide up the marking among TAs who can only work ~50 hours each? If you split them up such that no single assignment/question is all marked entirely by one TA, plagiarism seems like it would be very difficult to catch. Is the marking that you guys do usually divided on a per question/assignment basis?
There are definitely rules, which are more or less clearly defined. If you care enough to get into the nitty gritty of it, you can come up with the IUPAC name for almost anything. That said, I can name simple compounds off the top of my head, and anything more complex I can just ask the computer to tell me (which I think we were bitching about at one point, but if you can tell me what "benzyl 4,7-difluoro-1-(methylsulfonyl)spiro[indoline-3,4'-piperidine]-1'-carboxylate" is just from the name, more power to you. And that's a fairly simple structure). That said I, and most other people I know aren't terribly interested in IUPAC names for things, most of the time, so it's kind of pointless to learn - it's an enormous amount of work, for very little reward.
The professor I was working with split it up by page. So I would end up grading 700 of the same page of the same exam over the course of a couple days. Which leads very quickly to anger.
VishNub on
0
Options
ShivahnUnaware of her barrel shifter privilegeWestern coastal temptressRegistered User, Moderatormod
There are definitely rules, which are more or less clearly defined. If you care enough to get into the nitty gritty of it, you can come up with the IUPAC name for almost anything. That said, I can name simple compounds off the top of my head, and anything more complex I can just ask the computer to tell me (which I think we were bitching about at one point, but if you can tell me what "benzyl 4,7-difluoro-1-(methylsulfonyl)spiro[indoline-3,4'-piperidine]-1'-carboxylate" is just from the name, more power to you.
There are a lot with common names or non-IUPAC-yet-still-guessable names. Like 2-acetoxybenzoic acid which is much more commonly called acetylsalicylic acid. Or N-(4-hydroxyphenyl)acetamide, better known as acetaminophen. For a while I thought it was better just to use IUPAC for everything, but everyone really does use the other names and as much as it sucks, IUPAC nomenclature hasn't been nearly as useful as it seemed when I first learned it.
I'm not sure what's up with all the chemistry talk suddenly, but it seems like many of these instances of people using or being TAs represent a misuse of TAs (and possibly lectures).
Lectures shouldn't be about writing 10 page papers with 10 sources or other generic term papers. Lectures are for broadly distributing vast amounts of relevant factual information and theory to a large group of people (I know this isn't how it often works, but in my cases the professor was the one actually grading the term papers). Preferably, the professor presents the information in a variety of ways so students can recognize it independently. Just teaching out of a book provides nothing to the student (although a lot of professors and TAs go that route).
There's no reason a professor couldn't accomplish this himself while using teaching assistants to actually assist teaching by tutoring and grading exams with objective answers (i.e. multiple choice, short answer, fill in the blank, listing things, or even just answering and proving you know why that answer is correct). Using TAs for actual lecturing and grading research papers shortchanges the students (unless they're actually graduate student instructors, in which case they're not so much assisting as being a form of cheap labor for the university).
Using a TA for grading essays is shoddy teaching, but using multiple TAs for grading within the same class is an abysmal approach. It becomes more difficult to catch copying, standards will differ greatly, and there's no way for a TA to concretely know what professor expects from students.
Research work in college, especially at the undergrad level, is so far beyond irrelevant that it does shame to the word.
It's kids looking up things other people did, and then citing it in a paper that tells the reader nothing. Of all the "research" I did in 6 years of undergrad and post-grad, the only thing I ever learned from it all was how to properly format papers.
Beyond a student's personal development, almost all undergraduate work is useless (the only potential exception is senior project work that needs to be at a publishable level - and many schools and programs don't require that). Graduate level work is very similar, but most students should end up with a thesis capable of being published (it's supposed to be vetted, anyway).
Otherwise papers exist to test your knowledge of subject matter and your ability to interpret information on your own and potentially draw your own conclusions (usually undergraduates and graduates simply arrive at the conclusions of their predecessors or adopt the conclusions of someone in literature they read). Many students see them as busywork due to their frequency and professors' focus on minutae like proper citation style and cover page formatting.
Unfortunately, unless professors and teachers actually have a discussion with their students, essays are really the only way they can test to see if students can (somewhat) critically apply the knowledge they're learning. Filling out answers on a multiple choice test is great for testing rote memorization, but you can't tell if a student actually knows what it means if they don't apply it in some fashion (unfortunately, quite a few teachers and professors don't actually use their essays for this and like to pretend they're English professors and grade you primarily on ridiculous things like grammar, formatting, and spelling).
I can ask you how to conjugate dormire, or I can ask you to write a paper about a topic from Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. That way you can (hypothetically) prove you can read Italian as well as your knowledge of basic grammar as you attempt to express complex ideas in a foreign language. I can ask you who declared the first Crusade, or I can ask you to write about what you think the impact of the crusades was (where you'll have to give me an assortment of information about religious turmoil, political situations, and fitting historical figures). Ostensibly sources for these should be used to check whether outlandish bits of information students include are factually supported, but I've very rarely seen professors actually examine sources outside of my graduate career.
That doesn't make my paper on the kings of the Third Crusade some brilliant masterpiece of historical analysis. It means I can tell you who went on crusade when, where, why and what (some of) the results were.
One of my undergraduate professors made a deal with his students: if you get published in a reputable journal you automatically get an A. How many students' writings did he have published in his 40+ years of teaching? 1.
Using TAs for actual lecturing and grading research papers shortchanges the students (unless they're actually graduate student instructors, in which case they're not so much assisting as being a form of cheap labor for the university).
Well duh. I believe it's tautologically true that graduate students are used as a form of cheap labour.
Part of the issue, I think, is that universities have dual functions: teaching and research. As such, their professors have dual functions: teaching and research. And so their grad students have triple functions: teaching, research, and learning.
I wouldn't be surprised to see some sort of negative correlation between a professor's research output and a professor's teaching quality. (Though my current graph theory prof seems pretty good on both.)
I think there are just some professors that don't want to teach. My recent work finishing up my Physics cert brought me into contact with a few of them.
I've also had awesome professors that were also doing crazy research and getting published all over the place.
Basically I think what I'm saying is that rather than a sliding scale between quality teaching and quality research, maybe we need to have the two at opposite ends of the graph with an added dimension for general bitterness toward academia.
@ Hippofant: I personally only do classes from 60-160 students where I’m the only TA. However from the people I know that work with multiple TAs when possible they split the marking by question. If that’s not possible they try to shift the workload around so one or several people do assignments and the extra deal with other responsibilities (tutorials, office hours, etc..)
@ President Rex: While it’s kind of a secret of universities and not discussed the primary responsibility of professors with doctorates is research not teaching. Typically they are responsible for 2 lectures per semester for 2 semesters and pretty much the rest of their time involves research, conferences, etc.. Granted there are other teaching responsibilities like lecture prep, office hours and test design but less than half their time (as little as a third for some) is spent on teaching related activities. If they marked stuff it would make it pretty difficult for them to carry out their research duties.
I will agree that it’s pretty shoddy to use multiple TAs for a single class. Some of the TAs turn out pretty good, some of them end up doing their best to duck any responsibility.
I admit bias because the subject was also one of my favorites, but one of my favorite teachers only taught because he had to in order to research, as stated by him to his students. I don't think it's a continuum with teaching on one end and researching on the other at all.
Posts
At public colleges maybe? My wife and I think pretty much every international student at my college paid something like 50% tuition and were eligible for academic and sports scholarships.
International students are eligible for scholarships at private institutions and athletic scholarships anywhere. They are ineligible for any money coming from the govt which is a sizable chunk of the money at a public school.
With regards to the other discussion going on, I think it is far easier for most people to proceduralize concepts when they are applying the concepts involved to a familiar set of facts. Otherwise you are likely going to waste half the class time going over the same basic set of facts every class in order to get to the real lecture with everybody still on the same page.
Yes.
Though I have seen some people go a little overboard to avoid having kids memorize anything, even though memorization is, in itself, a useful skill. Things like not having kids learn multiplication tables, even though being able to recall instantly that 9x7=63 is a) a useful fact in its own right, and b) necessary to know if you want to actually multiply larger numbers without a calculator.
Which is another reason our education system is terrible - too many people are draconically for or against the Dogma of the Week, without ever trying moderation and multiple teaching methods.
Basically, people suck.
The problem with people who depend entirely on calculators and computer simulations is that they can't tell when their calcs are feeding them bullshit. You don't have to be a total expert in whatever math you're doing, but you need to have at least a basic grasp of what's going on under the hood. Same goes for chemistry, yes you do damn well need to be able to recall properties of elements if you want to be able to grasp how they'll behave under different conditions.
Even Europe freely allows things that we would consider plagiarism.
This was my job for three years, basically. I saw mistakes like the op describes a lot.
People who actively work to understand their own ability to retain information can better manage how and what they actually remember (this is referred to as "metacognition"), but I've never seen anything indicative of early life memorization clearing out more space for future things to be memorized.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
As to the enhanced ability to memorize thing, that really sounds like a mild misunderstanding of metacognition. There isn't actually more space created, but the more practice you have at collating the information that comes in, the more efficiently and effectively it will be networked.
You don't necessarily remember more, you just have better access to more of what you remember, via stronger networks and a more ordered system of connections.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
As a chem major, I often take classes that are filled to the brim with engineering students who could absolutely care less about the classes because they have little to no real GPA standards. So, they talk through my physics and math classes like there is no tomorrow. They also have a huge copy network, whether it be for homework or assignments. It gets to the point that professors have to switch up tests to prevent the engineering students from totally cheating. At one point, they were copying entire tests onto their formula sheets.
In my calc class, I overheard one engineering student talking about how he can always bump his exam grade up by erasing portions, rewriting them correctly, then accusing the professor of misgrading his exam.
I have to learn this stuff to be able to be a competent chemist, and there are people around me not even willing to do the bare minimum. It is very frustrating, and frankly, our universities shouldn't be rewarding these special types of people with degrees and jobs.
Yeah. I'm not suggesting that memorization is either bad or entirely unhelpful but I feel it is much more important to learn how to do something than to learn this data -> this result.
Memorization is important; it provides a basis for scaffolding. Instilling knowledge for future use gives students a factual foundation for how something works. Teachers can then rely on this knowledge to help students develop more critical approaches to material.
Generally, low level university courses exist to provide a factual foundation for later development. You'll take Astronomy 101 and learn about false-color images for star counting or reading spectroscopy lines for hydrogen but then by astronomy 250 you'll be setting up a telescope to image a portion of the sky and then zero in on a star to use spectral analysis to determine its elemental makeup. You'll learn about the basic evolution of countries and the creation of major historical figures in history 101, so that you can more closely follow causes and events in the Middle ages in history 204 so you can learn about specific events regarding the crusades in history 309 so you can write your own paper with a wealth of source material and background in history 401.
This thread has an awkward train of thought implying that every college paper is or should be about original ideas and research. Most lower level college classes are proving you can analyze and synthesize information; that you've "mastered the basics" and are actually capable of producing reliable, usable information in higher level classes. This is, in fact, one of the benefits of a traditional 4 year university over a technical college or associates degree: you need to take courses in other disciplines to expand your knowledge base. You may never use that ability to distinguish different types of minerals you got in geology 105, but maybe it will help you describe geologic processes on Io for your high-level astronomy seminar's paper.
On being an international student:
Getting accepted to a campus as a non-native speaker can be an intimidating and stressful experience. But that doesn't really permit poor language skills - especially for written work done outside of class. I've been there. I know I've built incomprehensible sentences while in class, but my written work was goddamn immaculate. I had people say they thought it was written by a native speaker because I put the time in to make sure it was coherent and grammatically sound.
Usually international students take their opportunity overseas very seriously. Studying abroad is an expensive proposition that usually grabs a student's full academic attention (there may be parties, but if they need to complete an assignment, they make time). Occasionally students may be overburdened by having to due research assistant work outside of class, but usually professors are well aware of that sort of load on students (and it tends to be more prevalent for graduate exchange students).
But there are occasionally outliers who are there for a free ride (particularly with parts of the US's reptuation abroad as an easy ride).
On citing sources and plagiarism:
By the time I was nearing the end of my undergrad, I basically had to provide a citation for any time I used an idea from a source (this resulted in lots of "Ibid., [page number]" citations). In other cases and disciplines, students are only expected to directly cite quotations and provide a list of works consulted at the end. Unless you're building a research project with a literature review, most science classes don't have much in the way of bibliographies.
Citations outside the Anglosphere are ...unstandardized. In the US there are heaps of different citation styles based on your field or the general disposition of the written work. In many countries this sort of distinction doesn't exist. They may not even have a standardized way to make citations. Plagiarism as we understand it is pretty different from other parts of the world outside the Anglosphere (and there the US and Canada tend to be more strict than the UK and friends). At universities in the US, my course syllabi had plagiarims notices; one university had an expansive student handbook that was "mandatory reading" (i.e. nobody read it) that covered plagiarism. Abroad I had professors tell me to cite my sources, but no explicit mention of plagiarism.
University students around the globe are generally aware of intellectual property rights on some level, although they're generally not emphasized as heavily as the US. Keep in mind that Taiwan does not function the same as China; it tends to be closer to the US way of thinking - and even students from China are aware of copying intellectual material.
...Also, people in this thread seem to have a lot of TAs. I had ...maybe 3 throughout my entire undergrad.
The problem we wind up with, though, is when we never push students past that factual understanding and on to more expert-like behavior regarding the information. It's a major problem we have here in the United States in our schools, and there are a lot of people pushing to make it even worse. Because factual knowledge, regardless of the ability to actually use it, is very easy to measure via tests, and to (apparently) objectively apply as a standard with which to judge teacher effectiveness. Expert-like behavior and critical thinking, which should be the true goals of education in my opinion, is very hard to measure on any but the most superficial level.
Unfortunately, we've got a lot of people with no background in education or cognitive science making a lot of incredibly bad calls when it comes to our school system, and other people cheering them on to do it.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
I hated memorizing basic math when I was younger (and now I've started an engineering major! life is strange), but I find it appalling how difficult it is for so many people to do simple math in their head. People can't even take 20% of a round number at my work, what the hell. I'm not sure if that's because they never bothered to memorize simple math, or if they memorized it and then forgot it, so the concept of moving a decimal place to get 10% is beyond the pale. I did recently see that study that found a huge percentage of US students don't understand what the equals sign means, but that appeared to partially be because they're treating real life like a calculator.
Well, a lot of education is purely reactionary. People keep trying to "fix" what's broken by patching up the things that didn't work for them, but very few seem to actually have a concrete vision of how education should work from top-down. That is, I feel, one of the reasons education gets polarized, as ElJeffe suggested, into these dogmatic camps. There's no ability to perform broad-based research free of context, or even in multiple contexts. A study of like 30 students is considered big, while in computational biology, most of us won't even look at a study if it has fewer than several hundred individuals. It's all "This is what I've experienced personally, so this is what I feel, so this is what I'm going to do." I've worked with high school students whose teachers are entirely "See what I'm doing on the board, copy it down, repeat it yourself" and other teachers who are entirely "No, you don't need to actually know anything, because you can look it all up on the Internet or copy the formulas out of the book!" and while they're both shitty teachers, the former is much more readily identified as such, whereas the latter are somehow considered modern, cool, and effective... when really all they do is pass the pedagogical buck on to the next teacher, because their students often pass their class having retained nothing.
But I'll note that even people in education are often shitty horrible people. At my local faculty of education, I took a course called something like Gender Equality in Education, and the prof - female, tenured, former department head - had us do a reading from Louise Brizendine's The Female Brain. If you haven't read/heard of this book y'all, I can repost a rant I've made about it before, but it is utter and complete sexist tripe, having been labeled "pseudoscience" by Science and is in itself a plagiarized/fabricated work, because many of the references are entirely without content (and have been denied by the referenced authors).
So I'm sitting there, a student with a significant biology and women's studies background, and the prof does not even mention any of the many many factual errors in our reading alone. And all the other freaking teacher candidates are arts majors and they're just nodding and soaking it all up, because hell if they took grade 11 biology and know what a Barr body is (No, women do not receive a "double-dose" of the X-chromosome.). I ended up transferring out of that class after filing a complaint, but the prof wouldn't even acknowledge the pages of background research I presented her. And now, that shit's actually taken hold in the education system around here, with the TDSB president trying to pilot boys-only and girls-only schools, because "boys and girls learn differently". (Rejected by the school board parental trustees, ironically.)
I've had several other horrific experiences with people with extensive research and practical backgrounds in education, and suffice it to say, I really don't consider that a qualification for anything any more, except for the ability to say "pedagogical".
particularly for all undergraduate labs and intro science courses!
I think the difference is that people without that experience or qualifications will be wrong about important aspects of the subject. Almost universally.
This is why the cult of the layman is so wantonly destructive.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Mmm, perhaps. I've seen a lot of TAs who are better than their professors. Would that count? :P
I also think you're establishing a false dichotomy. A lot of educators with tons of experience and qualifications end up far shittier than the layman, because all that experience has actually pushed them in the wrong direction. (See, professor who's been teaching for 50 years and hasn't updated his/her course and/or teaching style for just about the same length of time, but goes, "Well I've been teaching here for FIFTY years!" when criticized.)
Some still think slide rules and log tables should be used in courses!
They aren't willing to update their research to address the now integrated fields (physics, biology, and chemistry are colliding head on and creating some super neat areas of research), so they lose funding, sit on their tenured butts, and generally refuse to change.
I'm talking about the people who are in charge of educational policy, at a local, state or national level. There seems to be a sort of sentiment that a complete layman is preferable in such a position to someone with experience or expertise in education, as evidenced by the people that keep getting elected to school boards that have no experience teaching or administrating schools and haven't even had a kid in the local public school.
For your example in particular, education unfortunately only provides additional tools to be used. Someone who has intentionally entrenched themselves in their paradigm from 50 years ago simply isn't going to benefit from any advancements in their field. This applies to mechanics and glassblowers just as much as it does educators, though. You just kind of hope educators know better, and they don't always.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Had a guy from the local education faculty's physics department come in earlier this month to a CS education research. He complained that it's taken decades for physics teachers to finally realise the pedagogical value for clickers (those devices that let the class answer live MC questions... and it's really debatable whether they even have yet). Then he turned around and criticized the guest speaker for focusing only on CS education and redoing the same things that have already been done in other fields. Well, yeah... maybe because nobody fucking listens! The sheer irony of it practically bowled me over.
Edit: Weird, I'm finding Education PhDs with google.
If I were to go on to a PhD at this institution, I'd have to specialize into Science or go Cognitive Science instead.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
They are scarily stupid.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Plagiarism is always fun in CS courses. When I was TAing data structures, I was somewhat lenient, since there's only so many ways someone can implement a linked list correctly. When things like variable names, indentation and line breaks matched? Then we had a problem. (And that was the reason why the professors in most CS courses didn't have formatting standards for coding, like most professional programming jobs require. Makes it easier to catch the copying.) Of course, after the students did their own implementation of the data structure, the next section would be "Here's how it's done in the STL libraries. 99% of the time, you can just use that one."
It's kids looking up things other people did, and then citing it in a paper that tells the reader nothing. Of all the "research" I did in 6 years of undergrad and post-grad, the only thing I ever learned from it all was how to properly format papers.
In an undergrad senior-level literature class I once took, my professor allowed for functionally illiterate people make good marks because they copied the formatting algorithm from the MLA handbook with few errors. Is this what's important these days? I spent tens of thousands of dollars and years off my life being taught how wide to make margins and how far from the top of the page I should place my header.
The Taiwanese girl probably was trying to cheat. Good for her.
? Uh, yeah, faculties of education give out <degrees> of Education. I'm pretty sure that's the overwhelming norm, at least in North America.
I TA'd two quarters last year in intro organic chemistry here - big class two sections of 350 each. I had three discussions of, nominally, ~30 students each. They weren't required to attend the assigned discussion or any discussion at all, or lecture in point of fact, since that's more or less impossible to administrate with 700 students. The first week I had ~25 students, the second I was down to ten, and after that I usually had between 0 and three show up for any given section. Whether that's because I'm a shitty TA or they didn't care is unclear. I favor the latter, but I'm biased.
Anyways, in interacting with the undergrads my biggest complaint is that many of them didn't want to think for themselves. They wanted rules they could memorize and make flow charts out of and generalities. That sort of approach really just doesn't work in organic chemistry; it's all situational. I don't know if it's because that's just what they'd had all their lives, but it's really frustrating when I get asked constantly, "is that always true?" or "will that be on the test?" I would always make them explain why they thought A was the answer, which I hoped would help a bit, but maybe not.
Another large part of it is that here, anyways, the majority of the kids are from the top 5-10% of their high-school classes. They're used to skating be without trying, then they get to college and they're just average and they don't know how to deal with that at first. I certainly didn't.
edit: re OT: Tell the prof, then it's his problem. I personally think she should get a second chance, with a grade penalty, but it's not up to you. CYA on this one.
I guess I just assumed this was the norm due to my experience with people who have PhDs in Arts Education or Special Education. Learn something new every day.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Out of curiosity... aren't there rules for organic chemistry nomenclature? I've been tutoring grade 12 chemistry students from a local high school for a couple years now, and their chemistry teacher never gives them the IUPAC nomenclature rules for organic compounds that I remember learning (like, carboxylic acid > aldehyde > ketone in terms of naming priority, or whatever) and then my students are completely and utterly confused as to how to name anything, because it seems entirely random, because... well, it's not like they've ever done anything with these chemicals before, and they're *just* learning organic chemistry for the very first time.
Re. TAs and plagiarism, here's another issue. If you have a course with 300 students, how do you divide up the marking among TAs who can only work ~50 hours each? If you split them up such that no single assignment/question is all marked entirely by one TA, plagiarism seems like it would be very difficult to catch. Is the marking that you guys do usually divided on a per question/assignment basis?
There are definitely rules, which are more or less clearly defined. If you care enough to get into the nitty gritty of it, you can come up with the IUPAC name for almost anything. That said, I can name simple compounds off the top of my head, and anything more complex I can just ask the computer to tell me (which I think we were bitching about at one point, but if you can tell me what "benzyl 4,7-difluoro-1-(methylsulfonyl)spiro[indoline-3,4'-piperidine]-1'-carboxylate" is just from the name, more power to you. And that's a fairly simple structure). That said I, and most other people I know aren't terribly interested in IUPAC names for things, most of the time, so it's kind of pointless to learn - it's an enormous amount of work, for very little reward.
The professor I was working with split it up by page. So I would end up grading 700 of the same page of the same exam over the course of a couple days. Which leads very quickly to anger.
There are a lot with common names or non-IUPAC-yet-still-guessable names. Like 2-acetoxybenzoic acid which is much more commonly called acetylsalicylic acid. Or N-(4-hydroxyphenyl)acetamide, better known as acetaminophen. For a while I thought it was better just to use IUPAC for everything, but everyone really does use the other names and as much as it sucks, IUPAC nomenclature hasn't been nearly as useful as it seemed when I first learned it.
Lectures shouldn't be about writing 10 page papers with 10 sources or other generic term papers. Lectures are for broadly distributing vast amounts of relevant factual information and theory to a large group of people (I know this isn't how it often works, but in my cases the professor was the one actually grading the term papers). Preferably, the professor presents the information in a variety of ways so students can recognize it independently. Just teaching out of a book provides nothing to the student (although a lot of professors and TAs go that route).
There's no reason a professor couldn't accomplish this himself while using teaching assistants to actually assist teaching by tutoring and grading exams with objective answers (i.e. multiple choice, short answer, fill in the blank, listing things, or even just answering and proving you know why that answer is correct). Using TAs for actual lecturing and grading research papers shortchanges the students (unless they're actually graduate student instructors, in which case they're not so much assisting as being a form of cheap labor for the university).
Using a TA for grading essays is shoddy teaching, but using multiple TAs for grading within the same class is an abysmal approach. It becomes more difficult to catch copying, standards will differ greatly, and there's no way for a TA to concretely know what professor expects from students.
Beyond a student's personal development, almost all undergraduate work is useless (the only potential exception is senior project work that needs to be at a publishable level - and many schools and programs don't require that). Graduate level work is very similar, but most students should end up with a thesis capable of being published (it's supposed to be vetted, anyway).
Otherwise papers exist to test your knowledge of subject matter and your ability to interpret information on your own and potentially draw your own conclusions (usually undergraduates and graduates simply arrive at the conclusions of their predecessors or adopt the conclusions of someone in literature they read). Many students see them as busywork due to their frequency and professors' focus on minutae like proper citation style and cover page formatting.
Unfortunately, unless professors and teachers actually have a discussion with their students, essays are really the only way they can test to see if students can (somewhat) critically apply the knowledge they're learning. Filling out answers on a multiple choice test is great for testing rote memorization, but you can't tell if a student actually knows what it means if they don't apply it in some fashion (unfortunately, quite a few teachers and professors don't actually use their essays for this and like to pretend they're English professors and grade you primarily on ridiculous things like grammar, formatting, and spelling).
I can ask you how to conjugate dormire, or I can ask you to write a paper about a topic from Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. That way you can (hypothetically) prove you can read Italian as well as your knowledge of basic grammar as you attempt to express complex ideas in a foreign language. I can ask you who declared the first Crusade, or I can ask you to write about what you think the impact of the crusades was (where you'll have to give me an assortment of information about religious turmoil, political situations, and fitting historical figures). Ostensibly sources for these should be used to check whether outlandish bits of information students include are factually supported, but I've very rarely seen professors actually examine sources outside of my graduate career.
That doesn't make my paper on the kings of the Third Crusade some brilliant masterpiece of historical analysis. It means I can tell you who went on crusade when, where, why and what (some of) the results were.
One of my undergraduate professors made a deal with his students: if you get published in a reputable journal you automatically get an A. How many students' writings did he have published in his 40+ years of teaching? 1.
Well duh. I believe it's tautologically true that graduate students are used as a form of cheap labour.
Part of the issue, I think, is that universities have dual functions: teaching and research. As such, their professors have dual functions: teaching and research. And so their grad students have triple functions: teaching, research, and learning.
I wouldn't be surprised to see some sort of negative correlation between a professor's research output and a professor's teaching quality. (Though my current graph theory prof seems pretty good on both.)
I've also had awesome professors that were also doing crazy research and getting published all over the place.
Basically I think what I'm saying is that rather than a sliding scale between quality teaching and quality research, maybe we need to have the two at opposite ends of the graph with an added dimension for general bitterness toward academia.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
@ President Rex: While it’s kind of a secret of universities and not discussed the primary responsibility of professors with doctorates is research not teaching. Typically they are responsible for 2 lectures per semester for 2 semesters and pretty much the rest of their time involves research, conferences, etc.. Granted there are other teaching responsibilities like lecture prep, office hours and test design but less than half their time (as little as a third for some) is spent on teaching related activities. If they marked stuff it would make it pretty difficult for them to carry out their research duties.
I will agree that it’s pretty shoddy to use multiple TAs for a single class. Some of the TAs turn out pretty good, some of them end up doing their best to duck any responsibility.