With competitiveness at the college level growing at a consistent rate, it is more vital now than it has ever been to maintain a high GPA as a student, particularly at the undergraduate level. However, with this condition comes a complicated hinderance: teaching assistants.

Though the base ideology behind teaching assistants is logical enough, seeing as how many college classes have 200-300 students in them, it is simply impossible to expect one professor to know each student and grade each assignment. However, there are a few cracks in the logic of teaching assistants in terms of how qualified they need to be in order to be assigned their position.

For example, I have heard stories in which the teaching assistant is brand new to both the class as well as working as a TA. In cases like this, the students end up being hurt in the process as the TA who has recently been handed a significant amount of power is unable to adjust and adapt quick enough. When the teaching assistant is just as confused as the students because it is their first time both teaching AND taking the class, it adds up to a very lost and ultimately inefficient class session.

When the teaching assistant who is grading you has no clue what criteria by which to grade, it can cause quite a large amount of stress on the students who have little to no impact on how they are being graded because the teaching assistant has most of the control. This lack of experience in taking the class also leads to an implicated power struggle between the teaching assistant and the students, who can’t possibly see why the teaching assistant is able to be grading their papers when they are currently a student in the class themselves.

In the end, teaching assistants will never completely be vanquished, but I just hope for future references these factors are taken into consideration before the role of TA is given out. Teaching assistants have such a large influence over the success of students that it is only a matter of time before they take this into consideration and pay more attention to whether they have the right prerequisites to be able to do the job well. When did the relationship between teacher and student cross the line of professionalism, and when will the effect of this change finally be truly addressed?