The Exponent - columns


04-20-2004	Previous edition: 04-19-2004

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Purdue needs TA task force

I can’t understand them.

That’s the biggest excuse I hear from people around me in my classes when an international teaching assistant is instructing. They teach us chemistry, they teach us math, they teach us economics and a bundle of other things in our 100, 200 and 300 level classes.

We just can’t get around their Asian, European, Middle Eastern and Indian accents, so we (stop going to class, fall asleep at the desk, insert alternate activity here) because they’re too hard to understand. By the time you’ve copied the notes on the Powerpoint slides and deciphered your teaching assistant’s last three sentences, you’re already two minutes behind and don’t have time to ask questions.

I’ve had several international teaching assistants (ITAs) during my two years here, and many of them are about as understandable as Cousin It. But do we complain to professors or department heads? No. We complain to each other. There are teaching assistants on this campus that may know the material they teach cold but have real difficulty conveying their knowledge to us. But the fault, dear friends, does not lie within the stars but within ourselves.

Contrary to popular belief, more than a couple bad evaluations do red flag a teaching assistant. Robert Wild, Assistant to the Head of Chemistry, said once a complaint is brought to his attention, he sends someone from his department to sit in on a class or classes to judge whether or not there is real problem.

Almost every school on campus takes legitimate complaints very seriously, but for Wild it’s not a problem of quality but quantity. Wild said he gets maybe one complaint a semester on problems with his faculty or teaching assistants in the School of Chemistry

The University of Michigan has created an ITA Task Force that covers the scope of problems with their ITAs. They are separate from the schools of study and run their own investigations. Purdue would benefit from creating a task force of their own as a place for student complaints and an investigative body. Faculty and staff from the appropriate school could be notified when complaints are lodged and help in the investigative process.

Is complaining enough, though? Maybe some of the blame lies with Purdue’s process for selecting ITAs. Every department on campus requires their prospective ITAs to pass a test given by the Oral English Proficiency Program except for the Departments of Chemistry and Mathematics. They use a different way to evaluate their ITAs before placing them in charge.

According to Wild, over the past couple of decades, the interest in the "traditional sciences" has greatly declined in the U.S. Not nearly as many undergraduates are getting degrees in chemistry and math as once were. Because of this, graduate programs are having to look internationally for students/teaching assistants.

The Chemistry Department’s selection process is different from the rest of campus. Foreigners already in the U.S., usually resident aliens for 2-3 years, when hired are taken through what Wild describes as a micro-teaching test where interviewees are videotaped teaching a 30 min. general chemistry question to a panel made up of a handful of chemistry graduate students, professors and staff. The questions are usually taken from a freshman Chemistry homework assignment.

They are graded on their ability to communicate the process of getting the answer to the panel. If the panel thinks the prospective TA’s English proficiency is suspect then he is sent to Oral English Proficiency Program and has to pass the Purdue Oral English Test/Oral English Proficiency Test (POET/OETP) before they can teach.

According to April Ginther, Associate Professor and Director of the Oral English Proficiency Program, the POET/OETP is a modification of the widely-used Speaking Proficiency English Assessment Kit, which uses excerpts from the Purdue Handbook, from departmental memos and e-mail messages are used to test the examinee’s ability to comprehend written materials and orally summarize those materials. Video presentations of informal conversations between undergraduate students assess the examinee’s listening comprehension and ability to summarize information orally presented.

If a prospective TA doesn’t pass the POET/OEPT, then he is placed in a program with the Oral Proficiency Office where the prospective TA has to stay at Purdue on his dime and go through a semesters worth of language sessions to improve his before taking the test the next semester.

Both Wild and April Ginther, Associate Professor and Director of the Oral English Proficiency Program, said they would welcome undergraduate students into the process of selecting an International Teaching Assistant (ITA). Undergraduate input could help snag some of the ITAs that slip through the evaluations.

Also, the idea of having a mid-semester evaluation for all teaching assistants has been brought up in the Purdue Student Government. A select number of classes and departments already have them, but a campus-wide mid-semester evaluation would place a bigger microphone in front of students. Ginther said that students don’t want to make a complaint about their teaching assistant for fear they might negatively be singled out in the class.

When evaluation time comes at the end of each semester in each of our classes, a good portion of us are jaded and fill out the evaluations too quickly because we feel like they don’t mean anything. Students aren’t really concerned with them sometimes because they think, "What’s the point of filling this out after I’ve already taken the class?"

I know I’ve done it in a couple of classes, but having a mid-semester evaluation would allow administrators and faculty to target sub-par teaching assistants and ITAs who truly don’t have a full grasp of the language before the semester’s over. It gives students an incentive to be open and honest because they have the chance of seeing results before it’s too late to do anything about it.

Jon Hoggatt, senator and junior in the School of Pharmacy, said he would like to see some independent body created as a place for students to lodge their complaints early in the semester. Both Ginther and Wild are in favor of mid-semester student evaluations.

However, Purdue president Martin Jischke thinks the evaluation process is too long to do in the middle of a semester to effect that semester’s students in time to make a difference.

He said if the evaluation was administered in the eighth week of the fifteen weeks of classes, the results would not be known until the eleventh week. And it would take longer than that to send in an evaluator and make the necessary changes for teaching assistants with negative evaluations.

Ultimately, the burden of the grade still falls on us. Yes, the University has an obligation to provide us with teachers we can understand and learn from, but there are office hours, professors, tutors and help centers we can go to. Don’t be afraid to say something to your professor or someone in the department about teaching assistants you have who you just can’t understand.

Evan Kelsay is a sophomore in the School of Management. He can be reached via e-mail at opinions@purdueexponent.org.

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