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Comment by jhbadger | Hacker News Reader

>The irony here is perhaps missed by many. He didn’t grade homework in the first >place. He paid assistants to grade. This is common practice among tenured >professors with grant money to spend and graduate students beholden to them >(I’m not making a moral statement, just noting this is common practice).

Grading is part of what it means to be a TA, and being a TA is not some awful exploitation, it's what gives graduate students living money (I was a TA in the 1990s). It makes no sense (except maybe in a small liberal arts school with no graduate students) to have professors grade.

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Again, I’m not making a moral statement. But you yourself basically just said grading is a menial task that is below the station of a professor. (BTW, I teach at a small school and do all my own grading each semester for between 45-80 students depending on the courses I’m teaching that semester)

So if grading is part of the development process for a graduate student, then go ahead and continue. But that’s not the claim in the article. And if grading doesn’t serve a purpose anymore, then stop doing it. You can pay your assistants to do nothing for 20 hrs/week, or you can find literally anything else for them to do.

In some fields (maybe not mathematics) the graduate students could spend more time doing original research, assisted by teams of undergrads. That would likely make for a more productive learning experience than traditional homework assignments.

It’s an economic issue. Doing original research is not generating value for the institution, so they wouldn’t get paid. In fact, grad students are lucky they aren’t being asked to pay extra to be provided with research topics and lab time to pursue them. Maybe that’s another step in the monetization of higher education.

> Doing original research is not generating value for the institution, so they wouldn’t get paid

Literally how grants work.

If the undergrads are still paying tuition then the economics won't change. They'll just be paying for more practical experience instead of graded homework.

> grad students are lucky they aren’t being asked to pay extra to be provided with research topics and lab time to pursue them

It depends on the field, but grad student wages in science and engineering are usually much lower than what industry would pay for similar work. Academic research is very cost-effective because most of the work is done by underpaid graduate students.

> Doing original research is not generating value for the institution, so they wouldn’t get paid

It is the _main_ activity which "generates value" for an institution, whose primary goal is conducting research.

Once you finish your classes research is all you are doing. What else are you paying for?

> What else are you paying for?

- Lab access

- Access to PhD advisor

- Research seminars

- ...

Research tends to be deep but narrow - more like an internship than an undergraduate semester; courses can focus on teaching the fundamentals and background material in a broader and more systematic way.

I went to a larger university, and was in the math department for most of my coursework. My math homework was graded by fellow undergraduate students who received a rubric and selected 4 problems per homework set, out of about 8ish (most classes. A few tough classes only assigned 2-3 proofs or so a week) but the TAs would grade the exams and the professors wouldn’t grade anything. Homework was at most 15-20% of one’s grade, exams being the rest. But most of my professors didn’t care about the homework as it was a tool for learning the material that was on the exams.

Ours was 10% homework/90% final exam or 100% exam if you didn't want to submit homework.

> grading is a menial task that is below the station of a professor

Isn't there a P != NP element to this? Doing the work is hard. Checking it is not.

If a student honestly attempted a problem and failed, diagnosing the failure may be worth the professor's time, but given the bunchiness of undergrad (and frankly, any junior learning) mistake varieties, chances are the TA can identify the issue as well.

Sort of, but not really. For multiple guess type tests, there is that element. However, other types of tests and particular homework, there's not that as much. We're not interested so much in did you get the right answer as did you follow the right techniques.

At least this is about math where there is usually a single right answer. For things like English where the question is, did you get the right points? There's should be debate over even what is the right points in any large work. And so if you're convincing in your argument of what is the important points, you can pass homework.

Edit, fix autocorrect

> multiple gas type test

Multiple choice?

> not interested so much in did you get the right answer as did you follow the right techniques

A student honestly attempting math problems, if it’s a well-designed problem, shouldn’t be able to get multiple answers right with wrong methods.

> For things like English where the question is, did you get the right points?

I’d say a professor should be grading English essays. But a TA can grade short answers, e.g. did you grasp the theme or understand an extratextual reference.

For math classes there is not a single correct answer, it's worse in that regard than many other fields.

Answers are proofs, not numbers, and there is a ton of nuance, and it is incredibly hard to grade.

It's not as easy as judging the quality of a computer program written as an assignment.

There is, but AI really turned the tables here. With human students you can gauge their "priors" and grade it fairly easily and like you say the mistakes are bunchy. With AI the priors are so different and their steering and everything ends up in a deep dark forest where no one knows whats going on. And it becomes a whole first-principles effort to grade it. Imagine if everyone in class was that weird genius who solves things in a roundabout way that you end up appreciating 2 days later. In person exams have become a must almost.

> Grading is part of what it means to be a TA,

Checking students' homework is part of what it means to be a TA. Grading is a choice the university makes; it's absence makes one no less of a TA.

> being a TA is not some awful exploitation

It's certainly exploitation. For some TAs, who get overworked and lorded over, and in universities when the pay is low, it's awful exploitation. For most TAs it is 'regular' exploitation of getting a crappy salary for serious highly-skilled work.

The 90s is 30 years ago. You are out of touch with how things work now.

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