In her past two columns, Grand Marshal Julia Leusner ’08 reiterated ­one of the key points from her campaign last semester—that the Institute’s teaching assistantship program needs a dramatic overhaul. Just like the spring, she cited communication barriers and the TAs’ lack of qualification. Unfortunately, also just like the spring, she made unfounded accusations and offered “solutions” that were both unfeasible and impractical.
First, from a purely logical perspective, Leusner’s arguments were founded on questionable or downright false premises; she made assertions that made no contribution to the validity of her point but served rather as emotional fodder that would incite her readers to action. She referenced a survey and made sweeping generalizations from its results. She neglected, however, to include any actual figures or even a response rate. How am I supposed to believe that two-thirds of undergraduates have had problems when I doubt even a quarter of the undergraduate body responded? She then went on to claim that TAs are often unqualified. This may very well be true—but she justifies herself by referencing computer science graduate students who are completely unable to program. Speaking as a computer science graduate student myself, I find that exceedingly hard to swallow; such an individual could not survive a full semester and wouldn’t have been admitted in the first place.
But, let us assume that Leusner’s assessment of the TA situation was correct. She proposed three steps that RPI should take to rectify those issues. First, she suggests a complex analysis and inventory of graduate student “capabilities” to better match TAs with courses. Unfortunately, while it is a noble idea, that database would be both incomplete and ineffective. The graduate funding policies generally allow students to receive Institute funding as a TA for up to four semesters, usually the first four semesters of their tenure as graduate students. With that in mind, it is absurd to assume that a department could build a comprehensive database of capabilities since the teaching capabilities of students constitute an unknown for their first year or so.
Furthermore, I would maintain that the database that Leusner proposes would not make much of a difference. Teaching assignments are not made in a vacuum; the people making those decisions typically do have some knowledge of the candidate TAs’ strengths and weaknesses. They get this information by way of course feedback from previous semesters as well as general familiarity with the individual students they are dealing with—in some cases, individuals are even asked what teaching assignments they would prefer. So, given that and the assumption that no department administrator would intentionally make a poor TA assignment, it seems that the explicit creation of such a database would waste time only to create a faulty product that would provide little practical benefit.
Leusner’s second and third proposals are both related to the communication barrier that undergraduates often face when working with foreign TAs. She suggested higher standards of admission with regard to language skills and offer more opportunities for individuals to improve their English fluency. It would be reasonable to re-examine our standards and offerings, but I would argue that Leusner’s ideas come from an incorrect diagnosis of the problem. My own experiences have been that several members of the RPI community—undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty alike—are difficult to communicate with, not because they don’t have an adequate grasp on the English language, but rather because of regional accents.
Changing admissions standards is therefore neither necessary nor even reasonable; Rensselaer should not discriminate based on individuals’ native regions as reflected by their accented speech. More appropriate solutions would find ways that these students can still teach effectively, in spite of their handicapped verbal communication. These could be as simple as encouraging written correspondence, small-group interaction, and even suggesting that TAs publicly acknowledge that they may be difficult to understand, inviting people to stop them for clarification when necessary. All these might cause dramatic improvements without insulting anybody by implying that they shouldn’t be at RPI.
