Ryan ChartrandAn Academic Senate proposal by the Senate’s Faculty Affairs Committee has prompted discord over the concept of allowing graduate students to teach regular courses.
The proposal made Nov. 2, 2007 was accepted and became a resolution on evaluation of teaching associates. The Academic Senate recommended that a committee of 11 representatives and appropriate faculty and administrators develop a policy regarding the employment of graduate students as teachers.
The Academic Senate agreed that gaining teaching experience is an important part of graduate programs, and that teaching would be a key source of financial support.
Depending on the department, graduate students teach only one course their first year as a professor. Once they have taken more designated courses, they can teach more.
Graduate students are not required to take tests necessary for a teaching credential, such as the California Basic Educational Skills Test (CBEST) or California Subject Examinations for Teachers (CSET) before instructing.
However, graduate student David Renfrew, who teaches precalculus, doesn’t think this makes graduate students lower-quality professors.
“My professor told me about an engineering grad student who got a straight 4.0 on his evaluations, which means he has done excellent with everything,” Renfrew said about a fellow graduate student and professor. “(Graduate students) are probably some of the best teachers.”
After the kinesiology department was allocated $210,000 for the 2006-07 school year through college-based fees, the department hired eight graduate students to teach labs in what was considered “a very positive addition to our graduate program,” said kinesiology department chair Gerald DeMers on the department’s Web site.
Graduate students are paid less than regular professors. Renfrew is currently paid $870 per unit during his first year as an instructor.
“We’re poor, so it’s a good job for us,” he said.
Renfrew makes around $2,610 for the three-unit class he teaches, MATH 116, precalculus algebra I. That is nearly half of the $5,700 27-year mechanical engineering instructor Jim LoCascio makes.
LoCascio is an Academic Senate representative for the College of Engineering, and will be a statewide academic senator starting in the fall. He also opposes the Academic Senate resolution.
“Graduate students do not have a good foundation in their own fields,” he said.
LoCascio used himself as an example of this; he won an Outstanding Teaching award as a second-year graduate student and teacher’s assistant at UC Santa Barbara, though he admits “my knowledge was zero. It was minimal.”
“I probably have delivered 8,000 lectures since I began teaching, and my lecturing has evolved continuously,” he said. “The first seven years were not nearly as thoughtful as they are now.”
Though guidelines will be made regarding training, supervision and evaluation of graduate student teachers, LoCascio considers such policies pointless.
“If graduate students get terrible evaluations, what’s the action?” he asked.
Renfrew thought the policy allowing first-year graduate students to teach is a unique quality of Cal Poly.
“Grad students come to Cal Poly specifically so they can teach,” Renfrew said.
However, LoCascio is displeased that graduate students teach at Cal Poly because it makes the CSU more like a University of California school.
“Cal Poly is moving away from the 35-person class to UC lecture halls,” LoCascio said. “Why send your child to a CSU if it isn’t for what you perceive as having small classrooms with real professors? The Academic Senate is just looking to save money.”