Teaching assistants are extremely common on the University of Illinois campus. In my 5 semesters at this school, I have had 13 TAs. TAs are usually students themselves, applying for their masters or doctorates in the subject in which they are teaching.

This can have both positive and negative effects.

First, the positive. TAs are students, and therefore are more sympathetic to students and their class load. While professors can sometimes not even remember their college days because they were so long ago, TAs were more recently in school, and understand the pull of classes nowadays. TAs also bring candy a lot to discussion classes. So, they get extra points. Candy rules.

But on the other hand, because most TAs are in graduate school, they definitely are used to harder grading on their own work. Therefore, their grading on our work is exponentially more difficult. They are used to being judged on their area of expertise and are used to be judged harshly. Therefore, we, as the undergraduate students they teach, are often subjected to the same system of grading. We are at a different level academically from these TAs who are persuing graduate degrees, and therefore shouldn’t be graded as they are graded.

I have to say, that although about half of my teaching assistants have been more difficult for whatever reason, I have usually learned more from the TAs themselves than from actual professors. Professors are sometimes so academically removed from students with their proposals and books they have written that it becomes hard to relate to the students. So while sometimes TAs can be harder on us, they also help us learn to a better degree.

University of Illinois students also have an advantage of finding out which teachers or teaching assistants are good or not. It’s a website called Rate My Professor, that gives students an insight into teachers at their school. Check it out before registering for classes! It’s helpful!