We are allocating Teaching Assistants to courses based on the needs of the course. Even with the same enrolment, any two courses will have greatly different needs for Teaching Assistant time. One course may have 5 assignments and 10 supervised and graded labs, while another course may have 3 assignments, no labs and a take home final. Our TA formula tries to model those different needs. It is an extremely simple model, but appears to be working to fairly allocate Teaching Assistants.
The formula uses some base values of time-to-complete for the common tasks for teaching assistants. The base values came from discussions with present and past teaching assistants about task duration. Those base values ares shown below. The values are modified for individual courses in consultation with instructors.
The formula does not consider drop rates or the fact that often students simply don't submit an assignment, meaning that the formula actually provides more time per TA activity than is shown by the estimates.
| Task | Time estimate per student |
|---|---|
| Grading Lab Exercise | 4 minutes |
| Grading Assignment (1000/2000 courses) | 8 minutes |
| Grading Assignment (3000/4000 courses) | 15 minutes |
| Grading Assignment (3000/4000 courses) | 15 minutes |
| Grading Group Project Submission | 20 minutes |
| Grading Midterm | 5 minutes |
| Grading Final Exam | 8 minutes |
| Contact/Prep time | 5 minutes |
The estimates are used to create a total number of TA minutes required, given the initial enrolment of the course and the information provided by the course instructor (number of assignments and labs, midterms, projects, etc). The total number of minutes is divided by the number of minutes in a full time TA position (140 hours) and the result is an estimate for the number of TAs a course needs.