As class sizes increase, teaching assistant Zen Dochterman finds himself with too little time to grade too many papers and quizzes.
The cap for sections in the humanities division increased this quarter from 20 to 25 students to help the departments deal with budget cuts.
Meanwhile, TAs are still paid for working 20 hours a week.
“Last year we were supposed to spend 20 hours for 20 students, and this year we’re supposed to put in 20 hours for 25 students,” said Dochterman, a TA for Survey of Literature: Age of Enlightenment to 20th century. “We’re grading more papers and quizzes and having longer office hours. It takes a toll on undergraduate education.”
In response to this increase in class size, TAs face a decision to either adhere to the 20 hour-a-week workload or increase their hours to accommodate more students.
The effects of larger section sizes go beyond making TAs feel overwhelmed with grading more papers and having longer office hours, because some undergraduates are affected in their ability to voice their ideas and opinions during discussion, said Yu-ting Huang, a teaching assistant for Survey of Literature: Age of Enlightenment to 20th century.
“So it’s not about getting paid more, it’s about quality of education,” Huang said.
The department of comparative literature has tried to address this issue by attempting to streamline and reorganize the requirements for courses and give TAs a formal document that clearly describes their job expectations, said Sarah Older Aguilar, lecturer of Survey of Literature: Age of Enlightenment to 20th century and a former TA for the class. In addition to the department-wide efforts to help TAs cope with this issue, Older Aguilar also gave her TAs a clear rubric for midterms so they could be graded faster and made the reading load a little lighter so they can focus more on working with students on their writing.
“I’ve really stuck to not being intimidated by the fact that there are more students (in the discussion sections),” Older Aguilar said.
TAs are paid to work for 20 hours, so it doesn’t make sense for them to work more than that, Older Aguilar said.
There has not been a large increase in number of students in each section this year, in spite of the cap raise, said Ali Behdad, professor of English and comparative literature and chairman of the comparative literature department.
The department was able to keep this cap comparatively low because of funding given to the humanities division.
The division of humanities must make about $5 million in cuts by next year, yet the university gave the division about $3 million in bridge funds to help it deal with the financial predicament, said James Stinebaugh, the executive assistant to dean of humanities.
The bridge funds helped lessen the severity of the effects of the budget crisis, so the comparative literature department was able to maintain the majority of its TAs this quarter, Behdad said.
This quarter, all the sections are under-enrolled, yet there is one class with 24 students, and the smallest class has 18 students. Meanwhile, last spring quarter, the largest section for the same class was 20 students, while the smallest was only 14.
Dochterman said he has noticed a different sort of feeling among the students he is teaching this quarter compared to previous quarters. This effect is probably due to the increase in students, which results in students seeming weighed down in class, Dochterman said.
“People have less time to talk in discussion and to each other,” Dochterman said.