Which schools in the US uses teaching assistants?

Question

I'm interested in UC Berkeley, Stanford, Duke, Brown, Cornell, UCI, and UCSB. Do these schools use teaching assistants.

Major: History
Minor: Biology or Humanities ?

Answer 1

Lots of schools use TA's. That could be a bad thing, but not necessarily....

Let's say you are at Duke and you have a TA... then she is probably a graduate of one of the best colleges in the US. She probably has a MA or MS from Duke and is probably working on cutting edge research in some completely uptodate field in a ultra modern laboratory. She probably got chosen from 100 applicants to be admitted to Duke's grad school. She probably is way excited about her studies and can't wait to have a chance to pass on the stuff she has just learned. She will probably stay after school and spend lots of extra time with students because she is so excited about what she's doing.... in other words, shw could be as good as it gets for a teacher!

Or, you could go to some school that advertises that it doesnt use TAs to teach - then you get some burned out old guy who hasnt done any research in 20 years and can hardly stand to drag himself into class. He's tenured so he doesn give a s**t what you think about him, and nothing you say can be of interest to him.

So, TAs are not necessarily a bad thing at all!

Answer 2

All of those schools use TAs. That's because those are all research universities, and the TAs are being paid a pittance to do some teaching job so that they can work on their thesis research and live on rice and beans without having to take a part-time job at Home Depot.

The question is HOW the different institutions use TAs. In biology, for example, it would be typical for professors to teach the actual lecture classes, but TAs might lead the lab sections. In the humanities ... not sure how it would work there, but humanities departments usually have fewer TAs because they don't have labs to teach. TAs might lead discussion sections or grade papers I guess.

Answer 3

Yes, they all do. Pretty much all colleges do. That doesn't mean teaching assistants will be teaching your courses - most schools don't really do that. TAs will teach lab sections and lead discussion sections, as well as help sessions and they will grade your homework and often exams. I know this is true in the sciences, it might be slightly different in the humanities.

Answer 4

Most schools use TAs.

They'll lead lab sections in science classes, and they'll lead study sessions and grade homework in other classes. This allows the professors to spend their time doing research.