Those Who Can't, Teach

WE ONCE HEARD a Harvard graduate student describe his routine for grading papers and exams at the end of the term. At the time, he was a section-leader for three social science courses, responsible for a total of about 45 students--not an unusual workload for a teaching assistant. Each of the three classes required a long term paper and a final exam, and so, at the end of the term, the graduate student had roughly a thousand pages to read and evaluate.

His technique was simple he would take the whole pile into bed with him and hack away at it until he fell asleep. The funny thing was, he told us, the grades got much better as he got sleepier.

It can give one pause to realize the enormous power Harvard's Faculty has chosen to give its graduate student section leaders. Often untrained in teaching or evaluating written work these graders may single handedly determine a student's graduate school prospects, job possibilities, and financial aid standing to say nothing of family relations and emotional stability. We have seen enough responsible section leaders to feet sure that our bed-ridden friend is an atypical case. But we have also had enough frustrating experiences with shoddy, erratic teaching assistants to know that disparities among section leaders constitute a deep-seated flaw in the Harvard education, and one that seldom attracts the public attention of the Faculty's administrators.

This problem has, we were glad to learn last week, attracted the attention of Richard Marius, the director of the expository writing program. Expressing concern that graders often ignore, students' poor writing and do little to develop writing skills. Marius announced his plans to recommend that all section leaders in Core courses with paper assignments be required to undergo a graining program in criticizing written work. His proposal will come this summer, in a report on the expository writing program to Henry Rosovsky, dean of Faculty, he said.

It is encouraging that Marius shares our conviction that poor writing is a surefire sign of poor thinking, and that in few non science courses the actual subject matter is more important than the ability to write about it clearly. And we fear a great many section leaders do not operate under this assumption, we have seen too many papers come back with only cursory comments about the paper's content alone.

We urge Rosovsky to adopt Marius excellent recommendation and take whatever steps are necessary to make the training program attractive to section leaders Remunerating graduate students in the program financially or with academic credit would be one way to assure that the program does not become onerous and unpopular.

But we hope the Faculty's efforts to improve undergraduate sections will not stop there. If it is a success, the training program should become a requirement for all teaching assistants in courses with written assignments, with special scrutiny given to undergraduate section leaders and leaders for whom English is not a first language.

And we hope the Faculty will keep searching for imaginative ways to reform the section leader system as Marius has done. We have three to offer: set a low limit to the number of students a teaching assistant can be responsible for in a term, coupled with the necessary salary adjustments so that a t.a. does not lose money in the process; make it easier to switch sections in mid-term; and improve the mechanism for evaluating section leaders at the end of a term, in order to help departments, address specific shortcomings in individual t.a. 's.

Ultimately, measures like these will go a long way towards eliminating grading inequities we all know exist within departments, and between departments as well. But more importantly, reducing the number of section-leaders who sleep on the job will improve undergraduates' writing skills--as worthy an educational goal as Harvard can have.