Hi Jake,
I consult bruinwalk.com professor reviews every enrollment
period, but it has occurred to me that having a similarly formatted
“˜TA Review’ forum would be immeasurably more helpful,
since they do most of the grading in lower-division classes. So
this is just to get this idea out and see if the bruinwalk people
find it feasible.
Thanks,
Jennifer Lee
For those of you who don’t know what Jennifer’s
referring to, there’s a Web site (uclaprofessors.com) run
through bruinwalk.com, at which students can review UCLA professors
and read reviews written by other students. It was created and
launched by Avishai Shraga, a computer science alum, in the winter
quarter of 2001 as a perceived public service.
“It was really the result of necessity,” Shraga
said. “I was taking a lot of courses that were taught by the
same professors and I had been stung. A friend would take the same
class and have an easier professor.”
But, as Jennifer rightly points out, teaching assistants do most
to all of the grading in many lower-division classes at UCLA.
Professors may organize the curriculum, assign readings and paper
topics, and decide what percentage of your grade every assignment
is worth, but when it comes down to it, a TA decides whether that
paper you wrote is an A-minus or a B-plus. And that distinction can
make a world of difference.
So, on the surface, adding TA reviews to the existing review Web
site seems like a good idea. But, like the underwater helicopter
and the flying submarine, good ideas can be difficult to execute.
Shraga said the prospect of adding TA reviews has been considered
before, but has never been executed because of a variety of
complications.
First, the TAs on UCLA’s campus far outnumber the
professors. It would be nearly impossible to include them all.
Also, many TAs only teach for a few quarters, and the turnover rate
becomes so astronomical that updating the site would become a
full-time job for a programming team. “We looked at it a few
times, and every time the answer was no, it wasn’t worth
it,” Shraga said.
Also, most classes don’t publish TA information in
advance, so students still wouldn’t know beforehand which
section to register for.
But there’s also a bigger problem at stake here, one that
has plagued the professor review Web site since its creation, and
the prospect of TA reviews brings it front and center. Because the
site provides mean averages for numerical 1 to 10 scale professor
reviews, the reviews are only accurate when the mean as a form of
mathematical analysis is accurate.
In other words, the reviews only work when enough people vote to
minimize the influence of one or two outlying reviews. Small voting
samples make means useless.
Since this is already an issue on the Web site, including TAs on
the site, whose purpose is to teach smaller groups of students,
would inherently limit the accuracy of TA reviews because fewer
people could vote on them.
So, Jennifer, to answer your question, the possibility has been
considered, but for logistical reasons hasn’t happened. But
even if it did, it might not be as useful as you’d thought it
would.
E-mail Tracer the questions you’d like to see answered
or a possible title for his column at
jtracer@media.ucla.edu.