University Fails

One of the great failings of the university system is the placement of graduate students into teaching positions. Simply put, these graduate students are underqualified to be entrusted with the responsibility of running a college-level class. For someone with only a four-year degree teaching grade school is appropriate. But if you wouldn't entrust an undergraduate to teach high school, why would you trust a graduate student to teach undergraduate students? There is only one degree of separation between the two. And yet one is acceptable and the other is not. Why?

Money. Schools will not pay professor money when they can get the same service for graduate student money. But it is not the same service; it is a disservice to the students and parents who shell out thousands of dollars every semester, only to receive subpar instruction. In no way can it be expected that graduate students will perform comparably to a full-time professor. Not only have they most often received absolutely no instruction or certification in pedagogy, but their knowledge of the material is subsatisfactory. The years spent studying the material are important, and even disregarding their pedagogical deficiencies, graduate students do not have a sufficiently greater grasp of the material in order to effectively help undergraduate students in the position of the main instructor in the classroom.

It might be thought that there would be positive empathy in the relationship of a student teaching a student. Personal experience tells me that it is often the sympathy of the more experienced professor that is more desirable than the empathy of a fellow student, if there is any to be found. (And on the topic of fellow students, I have recently discovered the complete inability (or unwillingness) of fellow students to provide constructive criticism for my work. I suspect it is the latter.)

A professor is more often able to keep to the stated goals of the class, although many a poor teacher is marked by the failure to do this; a graduate student will almost never help achieve the daily goals of the class. Motivated students may still learn much through personal study, but then the purpose of the class is truly defeated; is better to have large numbers of students do personal research rather than show up week after week to a class run by an ineffective instructor.

Part of their ineffectiveness stems from the fact that they have their own studies that demand their attention. Often these graduate students are charges with completing a normal courseload on top of being responsible for an undergraduate class. This is often too much for a professor, who on the college level should be doing supplementary studying on top of knowing the core materials in a class in order to properly understand their context and answer any relevant peripheral questions that students may have. Instead, these graduate students often only look at the same materials the undergraduate students have, and therefore don't really know that much more than the students. For example, the class might be assigned to read selections from a piece of literature. Very often questions arise from reading a selection that can only be sufficiently understood after reading the entire text or related texts. And very often these graduate students haven't read the entire text, opening the shocking possibility that the student might actually be better equipped to talk about the literature than the instructor. This shouldn't happen, but it does.

So universities, stop being cheap. Hire more professors, give more classes to the professors who can handle it, and give the students what they deserve.