> Some friends in humanities were swamped though. Most because they cared a lot and spent a ton of time grading carefully.
huh, strange. for undergrad i went to a "good" UC and this is the opposite of what i saw in my humanities TAs. they either didn't give a shit and handed out A's like candy or graded on a rubric (i.e. did student posit counter-argument in paragraph N and support with primary sources in p. N+1) while paying little attention to content.
either way they certainly didn't seem stressed... unlike the STEM ta's... who were literally going gray in their mid 20s and clearly drank a lot.
At least these days, most grad students and adjuncts depend heavily on student feedback for their continued jobs. It creates a perverse incentive for sure.
A very perverse incentive: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/13/what-incentivizes-profess.... It also creates an incentive to avoid anything that could be considered remotely controversial, as I discovered the hard way a while ago. I was fine, but I didn't have to be.
I think the same incentive is present in the "real world." As a manager, it was in my short term self interest to inflate performance reviews. The company was aware of this, and imposed quotas, which only amplified the incentive but made the reviews less effective and more political.
The schools I'm at might be different but in my experience the student evals aren't the deciding factor in employment.
They are important and I was once talked to because of a poor student eval (although in that same meeting she said she wanted me to help out in course instructor meetings since I had taught the class several times and wanted me to mentor the new grads. It was a confusing meeting...) and I saw a fellow grad student come under a lot of scrutiny for some odd teaching (I really think the guy was bipolar) but there was never any fear that you wouldn't be able to teach next year.
I'm currently an adjunct at another school and luckily my evals have been quite positive overall so I haven't had to worry about it here.
If you catch a student cheating, they may also give you a terrible evaluation as payback. If the response rate is low enough, that can actually have an impact on whether you get to TA again. Those jobs are how many students fund their post-grad, which makes rocking the boat dangerous.
huh, strange. for undergrad i went to a "good" UC and this is the opposite of what i saw in my humanities TAs. they either didn't give a shit and handed out A's like candy or graded on a rubric (i.e. did student posit counter-argument in paragraph N and support with primary sources in p. N+1) while paying little attention to content.
either way they certainly didn't seem stressed... unlike the STEM ta's... who were literally going gray in their mid 20s and clearly drank a lot.