all-
I list here a simplified and stylized description of the results of the TA effort survey. I am happy to discuss details with anyone who is interested.
General conclusions: full time TAs report mean workload at 14.5 hrs and max workload at 22 hours. These self-reported hours are not crazily out of line with grad school specs (15 hrs/20 hrs), but a fraction of TAs certainly quote self-reported workload above grad school specs. More report max hours above 20-25 hrs than report mean hrs above 15-20 hrs; however, I learned from interpretive questions (survey items asking students to interpret whether they find the TA policies in the grad fields to be in compliance with guidelines) that student perceptions of compliance are more closely tied to mean hours than max hours. I interpret this to mean that students are not really concerned if a single week has a heavy workload; rather, students are more concerned if mean workload is high. so I am focused on managing the mean.
data on half time TAs is interesting but difficult to comment on as the sample size is very small, so I have taken note of those results but am not reporting them in detail right now.
I was surprised to note the wide variety of tasks that students were asked to perform. almost all of the 7 tasks I listed were of equal importance when averaged over the population. I was concerned that everyone would report that they were grading papers all the time.
Action items: the data is a bit preliminary to take much action, and it was never expected that one survey would lead to an unambiguous call to action. I am using a weak (two-sample) Bayesian prior that mean and max TA hours are right at the edge of compliance; one survey isn’t enough to make me take detailed action but two or three would be. I will survey students at end of this term and again next term. This data will be reported to the faculty and I will make preliminary recommendations. I will also be seeing if there are trends related to specific classes or faculty.
some have received the impression that I might stop surveying in mid-fall. to clarify: I will definitely survey through one complete year, both mid-term in fall and end-of-term in fall.