ouch.

I just read my teaching evals from last semester. Ouch. Some of them were great (I even got some "best TA ever!"-type comments). One commended me on coming to class every day. (I wonder if there are TAs who sporadically don't show up for class?) Others weren't so great. The majority of the negative comments were about grading, of course. This upsets me, because I didn't come up with the grading rubric and although I did grade the papers, I had little say in how the grades were actually tabulated (e.g., 5-10-15 points for drafts, nothing else; a crazy 6-point Fail-Excellent checklist of about 35 items). Also, I don't think students understand the difference between grading a draft and a final paper. Drafts are looking at larger issues (like did you at least write a semi-complete hypothesis) while final papers are looking at the larger issues in addition to the minor details. (Did you write a complete hypothesis? Did it make sense? Did you back up your hypothesis with literature or did you just pull this out of your ass? Did you cite things properly? Can you write a complete sentence? Did you use APA format? Do you even know what APA format is?) So, people think that if they get a good grade on a draft (lots of VGs from that crazy grading scale) they don't need to revise at all. There were also lots of "Jen doesn't know what she's talking about"-type comments. True, there are lots of things I don't know and I'm by no means an expert in Experimental Psych. But - I'm a TA, not a professor, and shouldn't be expected to know everything.

Maybe this is what I get for telling people they don't know how to write and calling them on plagiarism.